The founders of SD Translations started originally as English to Spanish and Spanish to English translators. The translations were handled exclusively by the two founders as they did not trust anyone else to do them. As the years went by, they had more work than they could handle, and some clients had to be turned down occasionally. At that point, they decided that they needed a reliable team of English/Spanish linguists to help with the workload. A testing package in the Medical, Financial, Legal, Insurance, and Technical industries was prepared in order to bring new members to the team. In addition to the written materials, the founders would personally call each linguist to ensure spoken proficiency of the source and target languages. The same system exists today.

Clients were so impressed that they would request different languages (Brazilian Portuguese was the second language offered), and in order to satisfy those clients, more team members were added... and SD Translations was born.