SDL plc
British multinational company
SDL plc was a British multinational professional services company based in Maidenhead, Berkshire, United Kingdom. SDL specialized in language translation software and services (including interpretation services). It was listed on the London Stock Exchange until it was acquired by RWS Group in November 2020.
Name
SDL is an abbreviation for "Software and Documentation Localization".
History
The company was founded by Mark Lancaster with nine employees in 1992. It opened its first overseas office in France in 1996 and was first listed on the London Stock Exchange 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 (MT) assets of Transparent Language in 2001. It bought Trados, a rival translation memory (TM) developer, in 2005. In 2007, the company acquired Tridion, a content management system vendor, and PASS Engineering, developers of the Passolo software.
The public source identifies “SDL plc” as british multinational company. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around British, multinational and company.
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The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q144175. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2020, 1992, 1996 and 1999.
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This entry incorporates text from “SDL plc” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.