SDL International, a leader in the emerging market for global information management (GIM) solutions, today announced its roadmap for combining the best of Trados and SDL technologies following the $60m acquisition of Trados, Inc in July.

Organizations struggle to optimize the complex, fragmented processes involved in managing global information. With today’s announcements, SDL is enabling organizations to standardize these business processes and easily share information assets across the GIM ecosystem of corporations, language service providers and freelancers. Before year end, SDL will release new, compatible versions of SDLX™, SDL Trados™, SDL MultiTerm™, SDL TeamWorks™ and SDL Translation Management System™. All releases will support backwards compatibility and will be provided as free of charge upgrades*.  In 2006, SDL will continue to roll out product enhancements that integrate the best of Trados and SDL technologies, including updating SDL AuthorAssistant™ and SDL KbT System™ for accessing Trados translation assets.

These announcements reinforce SDL’s commitment to its customers and to its business partners in the GIM ecosystem. The new product releases leverage key functional components from across the existing Trados and SDL products while building a new platform for product innovation. Migration from existing products will be supported with SDL continuing to lead the industry in support of industry standards.

“SDL is investing $10m per year in the technologies and business applications needed to meet the GIM needs of global enterprises,” commented Keith Mills, President Technology Division at SDL. “With the increased standardization and enhanced capabilities announced today, customers can optimize their processes across the whole GIM supply chain to accelerate global content delivery.”

For translation memory, the new versions of SDLX 2005 and Trados 7 will share key functionality such as automated QA checks, segment commenting, import/export filters and SDL MultiTerm terminology integration. These releases will also allow for more efficient information exchange using SDL ITD, Trados TTX and industry-standard TMX formats. SDL will be integrating SDL and Trados technologies to create a new single platform, SDL Trados, designed to move beyond the boundaries of today’s translation memory technologies.

SDL MultiTerm will be the platform for all terminology management and the new release will benefit from full Unicode support, integration with translation memory products and translation management products and a new web-based user interface. Experience from SDL TermBase Online will be built into the new SDL MultiTerm platform.

Knowledge gained from Trados GXT, Trados TeamWorks and SDL Translation Management System will be built into a new best-of-breed translation management platform. This will benefit from an enhanced API that provides access to GIM services for easy integration into other enterprise applications. The new releases of SDL TeamWorks and SDL Translation Management System before year end begin this process, with SDL MultiTerm integration, LDAP support and many other new capabilities.

“We are seeing the market start to transition from the 100,000 SDL/Trados desktop installations of translation memory and terminology towards GIM solutions,” added Terry Lawlor, Vice President Worldwide Marketing at SDL. “We are now deploying more than ten enterprise installations every month, with forward thinking companies in the GIM ecosystem, such as euroscript and InterSol, leveraging SDL technologies to also offer enterprise GIM solutions.”