Keywords Studios Brand Guidelines: Dublin Software Localisation Turned Games Services Group

Software localisation in a Dublin suburb.

Keywords Studios was founded in 1998 by Giorgio Guastalla and Teresa Luppino. English Wikipedia says the company began in Leopardstown, a suburb of Dublin, under the name Keywords International, and that its first work was localisation for business software. The Irish Times gave the same founders, year and starting point in a profile published on 2 March 2018, adding that the firm moved gradually toward video games in the early 2000s. English Wikipedia says a regional office in Rome opened in 2001 and that work for the games industry grew step by step from 2004.

The turn to games became a deliberate strategy in 2009, when Andrew Day joined as chief executive. The Irish Times reported that Day had known Guastalla for about 25 years, had once been his manager, and had done consultancy work for Keywords as it moved toward gaming before agreeing to lead it. English Wikipedia says the company then had 50 employees and relied heavily on a single client, and that Day set out a five-year plan to move its focus entirely to video games, with the aim of becoming a one-stop shop for the many stages of game development. Offices followed in Tokyo in 2009, Montreal in 2010 and Seattle in 2012. The Irish Times quoted Day as saying the firm had always “operated below the radar,” and English Wikipedia links that low profile to its habit of not releasing products under its own name.

An AIM float and a long run of acquisitions.

In July 2013 the company floated on AIM, the London Stock Exchange’s growth market. English Wikipedia says Keywords Studios plc was created in the UK for the listing and took over Keywords International, with trading starting on 12 July 2013. The first acquisition after the float was Liquid Violet, a voice-production business, in January 2014. By the time of the 2018 Irish Times profile the company had made 27 acquisitions since 2014, including 11 in 2017, and had up to 5,000 people in 42 locations across 20 countries, working in 50 languages and on 14 game platforms. The same profile said the company had moved from a single service to lines covering art production, engineering, audio, testing, localisation and player support, and that it had been named growth business of the year at the AIM awards in October 2017.

The acquisitions widened the business well beyond translation. English Wikipedia lists purchases including Certain Affinity, Climax Studios, Forgotten Empires and High Voltage Software, and says the October 2017 purchase of VMC added 1,300 staff. It describes the work in seven segments: art, engineering, functional testing, audio recording, translation, localisation and player support. At the 2019 Technology Ireland Awards the company was named company of the year, according to the same source, which gives a headcount of 12,340 for 2023. English Wikipedia also says that in July 2018 the company set up Keywords Ventures, a fund for backing start-ups, whose first investment was a 45 percent stake in AppSecTest.

Ownership changed in 2024. GamesIndustry.biz reported on 3 July 2024 that Keywords, which described itself in its statement as a “fully integrated creative and technology-enabled” company, had agreed to a recommended cash offer from the Swedish investment firm EQT, subject to shareholder approval, and that the company then had more than 70 facilities in 26 countries. On 24 October 2024 EQT announced that the investor group it led, with CPP Investments and Temasek, had completed the acquisition, and that the shares had stopped trading on AIM and been delisted from the London Stock Exchange. English Wikipedia says EQT took 51 percent and the two partners 24.5 percent each. The website now uses the name Keywords Studios Limited, and English Wikipedia places the head office in Leopardstown.

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.

A services name behind other people’s games.

Keywords Studios presents itself as a services partner to the games industry, and its website sorts the work under three headings: Create, covering game development, audio and art; Globalize, covering testing, game localisation and toy translation; and Engage, covering marketing, player engagement and Helpshift, a player-support platform. A separate media and entertainment line covers accessibility, post-production sound and music, and content localisation. The site also promotes AI services and says they draw on more than 25 years of gaming work. Its project pages are written as case studies, naming the studio inside the group that did the work. The home page, for example, credits Fire Without Smoke, one of the group’s studios, with a set of game trailers, and Helpshift with a player-support project, each under its own name.

In September 2026 the company gathered seven of its marketing agencies, including TrailerFarm and Fire Without Smoke, into one creative agency called FreeAnimal. Its press release of 9 September 2026 says the agency has studios in Los Angeles, London, Brighton, Montreal and Quebec City, and that clients keep working with their existing agency leads through a single point of contact.

For a design guide, Keywords Studios shows how a localisation firm can grow into a large group whose own name stays mostly in the background, a low profile its former chief executive described to The Irish Times. Compare Lionbridge and RWS, two other large language-services groups. For this guide we use an ink blue, a bright violet and an off-white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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