CETRA Turns 21

CETRA celebrated 21 years of serving clients around the world this month.

Jiri Stejskal founded the company to provide language support for litigation between a Czech bank and a US software provider, and for the first five years the company was called Central European Translations to reflect its focus on the languages of Central Europe.

The name CETRA is an acronym of the original name and was adopted in 2002 when the company shifted its focus from specific languages to a specific industry — market research — and started offering many more languages. As the company grew, CETRA found a new home in Elkins Park, PA (Philadelphia metro area) in 2004, which became CETRA’s global headquarters. In addition to Elkins Park, CETRA has additional regional operations centers in San Diego, CA; Alexandria, VA; Limerick, Ireland; Heidelberg, Germany; Accra, Ghana; and Seoul, South Korea.

CETRA was named to the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest growing companies for eight consecutive years (2008 – 2015), and today boasts of having provided language services for more than 400 market research clients worldwide, as well as thousands of other clients across industry sectors since its founding. (For more about CETRA’s start, please see “Three Lessons from a Start-Up.”)

Thank you to all of our fantastic clients, staff, translators, interpreters, other linguists, and friends across the globe for helping us to reach our now mature age!