GRIPS Origin

Switzerland based STAR Group is the largest, independently owned translation technologies and services company in the world.

In 1984, in the very beginning, STAR provided pure translation services to the global markets, resulting in today's network of 42 offices in 30 countries. While delivering high-quality translation and localization results, STAR linguists had to re-translate the same or similar sentences again and again. So, from the start, STAR understood the need for software that enables the reuse of previous translations.

For that purpose, Transit, STAR's translation memory tool, was introduced to the market 20 years ago. As with all of the STAR tools, Transit was first used internally to polish the technology and execute services. Once the technology was commercially viable, STAR made it available to the market. Shortly after the introduction of Transit, STAR integrated into Transit, TermStar and WebTerm, STAR's terminology management solutions, in order to keep terminology consistent. All of the STAR tools can be used as a complete integrated solution or as independent applications serving the needs of the customer.

While significantly reducing the translation cost and increasing overall translation quality and consistency, STAR was confronted on a daily basis with customers' documentation that showed increasing data inconsistencies in the source language. Sometimes, the same information was formulated differently, resulting in higher translation effort and costs, while some information was not consistent at all. STAR quickly understood the need for software that improves the data's source, before data is sent for translation. In 1993, the work on GRIPS began, and was introduced to the marketplace in 1998.

GRIPS is a single-data-source solution that conceptually integrates all of the product information in the context of the product itself, in a document and a language neutral manner. Once the information is in GRIPS, a simple script is all that is needed to deliver any information in any format (cross-media publishing), and any language, for any audience.

Today, STAR is the company to have architected the entire end-to-end technology stack for creating, managing, translating, publishing and automating global product information. This is significant because all of STAR's technologies have been architected to be tightly integrated. This higher level of integration yields measurably higher levels of efficiencies to STAR Group customers.

Central to STAR's corporate philosophy − and a core technology differentiator in all of STAR's products − is STAR's commitment to the Delta Principle (note the "A" in STAR's logo representing the delta), which effectively states that all new effort and work should be focused exclusively on what is new, or what has changed, and new work should never have to be expended on re-doing what has been done before. So, since 1984 to today, STAR has been committed to developing and deploying the highest quality single-source (or "re-usability") technologies in the market.