Celebrating our 40-year journey

“Academic Translators” (the first name of SimulTrans) was founded on the Stanford University campus, when the translation business was just starting. Since our inception, we have been the trusted, leading translation partner for Silicon Valley.

When his Stanford classmate Mihoko Yoh returned to Japan, she asked Mark to establish an office there. Then and now, SimulTrans serves Japanese, American and European corporations doing business there in Japan.  SimulTrans K.K. has been based in Tokyo these past 30 years.

"Sim ship,” short for simultaneous shipment,  became a buzzword in the software industry and a gold standard for global corporations. Recognizing this game-changer mentality, we changed our name in 1992 to SimulTrans, solidifying our position as pioneers enabling multilingual product launches.

Microsoft chose SimulTrans as its first outsourcing partner for a large-scale localization program, in many ways starting the software localization industry.  We hired hundreds of employees to handle this avalanche of work.

Recognizing the demand in the market for expert localization knowledge, we started a series of localization seminars at our headquarters in Mountain View. These popular events helped lay the foundation of Silicon Valley's localization knowledge.  SimulTrans many “alumni” became localization leaders at their new employers.

SimulTrans established a medical translation division of translators, reviewers, and project managers, specializing in medical terminology and processes to address the increasing demand for translated content from clients in the life sciences industries.

With the growing need for translation services from top clients like Netscape, which had developed the first popular web browser and access to the Internet, SimulTrans was the first translation company to localize the internet browser and define terms that billions of people use everyday, like “back” or “refresh.” 

With the growing need for translation services from top clients like  Autodesk (1990), Microsoft (1993), Netscape (1995), Motorola (1996), and the Gartner Group (1997), we set up an office closer to our clients. And so, Dublin became and remains our European HQ, then and now.

SimulTrans began to invest heavily in computer-aided tools to provide translators with a seamless interface for submitting, editing, managing, and storing multilingual content all in one place, leading also to cost and efficiency benefits to our customers.

Internationalization (l18n) tools coupled with our engineering expertise allowed us to test software products and assess if they could accommodate different locales (languages and regions) so they could be translated without engineering changes needed to the core product.

With the vast expanse of the US and its four major time zones in mind, we opened an office in Boston, Massachusetts, to be closer to customers closer to the East Coast.

In order to meet the demands of extensive audio recording projects for clients, we set up our studios in the Dublin office. This enabled us to access a wide range of highly skilled translators and voice talents across Dublin and Europe.

Investing in the future, SimulTrans bought its first building, the company's headquarters in Mountain View, just three minutes away from Google’s HQ. This purchase marked the beginning of SimulTrans’ portfolio of properties and another pillar to further support its stable foundation.

SimulTrans began providing comprehensive translation for structured content such as DITA. We championed this movement by speaking at conferences, holding workshops, and writing articles. Clients benefited from greater content reuse and translation memory savings.

Understanding the significance of ISO certification for our clients and its growing importance in vendor selection, SimulTrans took proactive steps to attain our first ISO certification, ISO 9001, in 2010. Subsequently, we achieved ISO 17100 and ISO 18587 certifications.

As clients began using Content Management Systems (CMS) and marketing automation platforms, SimulTrans collaborated with a variety of technology providers to offer CMS connectors and plugins to automate the localization process for our clients.

As our client base and content localization needs increased, we invested in a 3rd-party project management tool for our team of project managers. SimulTracker, our cloud-based project management system and client portal, serves as the primary platform for clients to easily oversee projects online 24/7. 

With more and more European clients, we acquired a translation company in Bonn. This move allowed us to serve our German-speaking customers in their time zone and language. We also brought on board an expert team of German translators and localization project managers, in addition to important customers in the manufacturing industry.

As our customer base on the US East Coast continued to grow, we set up a new office in midtown Manhattan. This prime location enabled us to engage more frequently and effectively with our customers and offer them more innovative technology solutions developed back in Silicon Valley.

SimulTrans acquired a long-established presence in Madrid through a long-term friend from the Microsoft days.  Now our valued Spanish clients enjoy a wider range of language solutions while maintaining their trusted relationships with the Spanish team.  The Spanish-language market continues to grow rapidly for SimulTrans, including also the Hispanic market in the U.S.

With the need for our clients to publish multilingual content faster, we expanded our language services to offer AI translation and AI audio voiceover services to help clients engage their global customers faster.

Our customers’ environmental, social, and governance (ESG) requirements are on the rise. In addition, we as a company are conscious of the impact we have on the community and the environment. We strive to integrate ESG principles into every aspect of our work.