SDL plc was a multinational professional services company headquartered in Maidenhead,

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the European mainland, continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...

. SDL specialized in

language translation Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. The English language draws a terminological distinction (which does not exist in every language) between ''transl ...

software and services (including interpretation services). SDL is an abbreviation for "Software and Documentation Localization". It was listed on the

London Stock Exchange London Stock Exchange (LSE) is a stock exchange in the City of London, England, United Kingdom. , the total market value of all companies trading on LSE was £3.9 trillion. Its current premises are situated in Paternoster Square close to St P ...

until it was acquired by

RWS Group RWS Group, known commercially as RWS, is a British company that provides intellectual property translation, filing and search services, technical and commercial translation and localization, and develops and supports translation productivity and ...

in November 2020.

History

The company was founded by Mark Lancaster with nine employees in 1992. It opened its first overseas office in

France France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans. Its metropolitan area ...

in 1996SDL International: History
and was first listed on the

in 1999. The company grew organically and via acquisitions. SDL acquired Polylang Multimedia in 1998, International Translation & Publishing (ITP) in 2000, Alpnet in 2001, and the

machine translation Machine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT (not to be confused with computer-aided translation, machine-aided human translation or interactive translation), is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates t ...

(MT) assets of Transparent Language in 2001. It bought

Trados Trados Studio is a computer-assisted translation software tool which offers a complete, centralised translation environment for editing, reviewing and managing translation projects and terminology- either offline in a desktop tool or online ...

, a rival

translation memory A translation memory (TM) is a database that stores "segments", which can be sentences, paragraphs or sentence-like units (headings, titles or elements in a list) that have previously been translated, in order to aid human translators. The translat ...

(TM) developer, in 2005. In 2007, the company acquired

Tridion Trimethadione (Tridione) is an oxazolidinedione anticonvulsant. It is most commonly used to treat epileptic conditions that are resistant to other treatments. It is primarily effective in treating absence seizures, but can also be used in ref ...

, a content management system vendor, and PASS Engineering, developers of '' PASSOLO'' software. In 2008, it bought Idiom Technologies, a global information system management business. In July 2009 SDL acquired XyEnterprise in an all-cash transaction to add

XML Professional Publisher XML Professional Publisher (XPP) is an automated XML based publishing system that was developed out of a proprietary typesetting system. XPP is a standards-based, content formatting and publishing application for the automatic composition, transf ...

as well as Contenta content management software and LiveContent to manage and deliver

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable ...

. This unit combined with Trisoft formerly Infoshare. In December 2009, SDL acquired

Fredhopper SDL plc was a multinational professional services company headquartered in Maidenhead, United Kingdom. SDL specialized in language translation software and services (including interpretation services). SDL is an abbreviation for "Software and ...

, a Dutch eCommerce onsite search and navigation, onsite targeting and targeted advertising software vendor. Later that same year, it bought Xopus, another Dutch company and the leader in online

editing. In May 2011 SDL acquired Dutch-based Media Asset Management company, Calamares, in 2012 the campaign management and social media analytics company,

Alterian Alterian is a campaign management and real-time marketing software company headquartered in Denver, CO with offices in Bristol, UK and Sydney, Australia. Alterian was founded by Mike Talbot, David Eldridge and Tim McCarthy in 1997. Initially b ...

, and in 2013, bemoko, a supplier of internet software for mobile devices. In January 2016, having undertaken a strategic review, SDL announced the divestment of Fredhopper and Alterian as non-complementary to its new strategy. In August 2020

announced a proposed takeover of the company for £809 million. The transaction was completed on 4 November 2020.

Operations

SDL provided software for language translation purposes.SDL offices around the globe
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References

{{Authority control Companies based in Maidenhead Companies established in 1992 Machine translation Companies listed on the London Stock Exchange

History

Operations

See also

References