SDL plc was a multinational professional services company headquartered in

Maidenhead Maidenhead is a market town in the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead in the county of Berkshire, England, on the southwestern bank of the River Thames. It had an estimated population of 70,374 and forms part of the border with southern Bu ...

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 software and services (including

interpretation Interpretation may refer to: Culture * Aesthetic interpretation, an explanation of the meaning of a work of art * Allegorical interpretation, an approach that assumes a text should not be interpreted literally * Dramatic Interpretation, an event ...

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 Pa ...

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 ar ...

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, 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 translati ...

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