SYSTRAN has done extensive work for the United States Department of Defense and the European Commission.

The company was established in La Jolla in California to work on translation of Russian to English text for the United States Air Force during the Cold War.

[5] Large numbers of Russian scientific and technical documents were translated using SYSTRAN under the auspices of the USAF Foreign Technology Division (later the National Air and Space Intelligence Center) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio.

During the dot-com boom, the international language industry started a new era, and SYSTRAN entered into agreements with a number of translation integrators, the most successful of these being WorldLingo.

The project has since been used in several research and industry applications, and its open source ecosystem is currently maintained by SYSTRAN and Ubiqus.