Acolad Brand Guidelines: The French Translation Roll-Up That Became Part of RWS

A French translation firm built by acquisition.

Acolad is a French language-services group whose story begins in the 1990s. The company gives its founding year as 1995, and RWS used the same year when it announced its purchase of the group in August 2026. French Wikipedia gives an earlier date, 1993, and an earlier name, Technicis, and names Benjamin du Fraysseix as the founder. In the RWS announcement, as Unite.AI reported on 3 August 2026, du Fraysseix, described as co-founder and former chief executive, said he and his father built the business through more than a dozen European acquisitions after starting it in the 1990s.

French Wikipedia says the firm began buying other translation companies from 2012. Its list includes Cogen, Arancho Doc, Soget and VO Paris, followed later by Translation Probst, CPW, Sémantis and HL Trad. In 2018 the group bought TextMaster, an online translation platform founded in 2011, along with Telelingua and AAC Global, which took its total to eleven acquisitions, according to the same source. The company’s own timeline describes the same years in broader terms: it says it expanded across Europe from 2013 and later reached North America and the Asia-Pacific region.

The name Acolad gathered what had been a cluster of separately named businesses. French Wikipedia says that in 2019 the du Fraysseix family bought out the stake held by the fund Naxicap Partners, taking family control to about 65 percent, and that the group renamed its entities under the single Acolad brand that year. The company’s own history page dates the change to 2020 and says the name was chosen to reflect a spirit of partnership. Both dates appear in print, so both are given here.

Amplexor, Ubiqus and RWS.

The largest step in the group’s growth came in 2020. French Wikipedia says Acolad announced on 21 September 2020 that it would acquire Amplexor International, a language and digital services provider based in Luxembourg, and that the deal closed in the fourth quarter of 2020 after regulatory approval, with some Amplexor business lines left out. The combined group had more than 2,000 staff at the time, according to the same source. In February 2022 the regional companies that had come from Amplexor took the Acolad name.

Two more moves followed. On 17 March 2022 Acolad bought Ubiqus, a French company focused on transcription, interpreting and translation, from the funds EMZ Partners and Indigo Capital; French Wikipedia puts Ubiqus at about 550 people at the time. In June 2023 the group sold its digital services arm, Acolad Digital, to the content-management group AmeXio. That unit had grown out of Amplexor’s content-management work and had earlier traded as Amplexor and Euroscript; the sale did not include the language services. In March 2023 Bertrand Gstalder, formerly head of SeLoger Group, became chief executive, and the founders moved to the supervisory board, French Wikipedia says.

The latest chapter is a change of owner. Unite.AI reported on 3 August 2026 that RWS Holdings, the UK language and AI group listed on AIM, had agreed to buy Acogroup, the French parent of Acolad. That report described Acolad as headquartered in the Paris area, with about 1,200 employees in 22 countries across Europe and North America, about three quarters of its revenue from localisation and related services, and about half from regulated industries, including a medical-devices practice. On 2 November 2026 RWS announced that the purchase was complete, following consultation with French works councils and regulatory approvals, Unite.AI reported the same day. Acolad now sits in the RWS Transform segment, and its website carries the line “Acolad is now part of RWS.” French Wikipedia places the head office in Boulogne-Billancourt, just west of Paris.

Design and documentation.

Translation and localisation companies sell a service that is hard to picture, so their public material tends to lean on numbers and names. RWS describes a network of more than 250,000 data specialists and language experts in its regulatory announcements, and TransPerfect’s standard press-release text, as used in 2026, lists offices in more than 150 cities on six continents and services in more than 200 languages. For a designer, those counts work as a kind of map: the reach of the company is shown through cities, countries and languages rather than through a product on a shelf.

Platform names carry much of the identity. RWS keeps Trados, a translation-memory tool it gained through its 2020 merger with SDL, as a product brand, and in March 2026 added Language Weaver Pro, an AI translation model it says was built with Cohere. TransPerfect gathers its software under GlobalLink, with GlobalLink Media for subtitling and dubbing. This guide describes them only as their makers do.

The companies also explain themselves through their structure. RWS sorts its reports into three named segments, Generate, Transform and Protect, while TransPerfect runs divisions such as TransPerfect Media, TransPerfect Gaming and TransPerfect Legal Solutions under one compound name. Acquired businesses can be renamed into these families: Moravia, bought by RWS in 2017, became RWS Moravia in 2018, and RWS completed its purchase of Acolad’s parent company in November 2026.

Corporate pages on owners and offices are part of the same picture. A listed company such as RWS publishes its headquarters, market and deals through regulatory announcements; a private one such as TransPerfect states its global and regional headquarters in its press releases. This guide follows those documents, and marks plainly what rests on a company’s own word.

One partnership name over many former firms.

On its website Acolad presents itself through services rather than a single product. Its home page groups the offer into translation and localisation, interpreting, multimedia, data services, consulting and transcription, and it names its own platforms: Lia Go for self-service AI translation and Lia Live for interpreting by phone, by video, on site and with AI. The company says it handles more than 500 language combinations and works with more than 10,000 experts; French Wikipedia gives more than 300 language combinations and a presence in more than 25 countries. Its about page names the group brands as Acolad, TextMaster and Ubiqus, and describes a large freelance community behind the staff.

The company lists rankings and standards in its own words. It says it was placed ninth in the Slator 2025 Index in the “Super Agency” tier and 17th in the Nimdzi 100, and it lists certifications including ISO 17100 for translation services and ISO 18841 for interpreting. Those are the company’s statements. At the time of writing the site still uses the Acolad name, with a short note on its new owner at the top of the home page.

For a design guide, Acolad shows how a run of small regional acquisitions can be gathered under one new name, and how that name can carry on inside a larger owner. Compare RWS, the group that now owns it, and TransPerfect, another large language-services company. For this guide we use a deep teal, a warm coral and stone grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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