© 2016 American Physical Society. We develop an approach to enable the full-wave simulation of stimulated Brillouin scattering and related phenomena in a frequency-domain, finite-element environment. The method uses transformation-optics techniques to implement a time-harmonic coordinate transform that reconciles the different frames of reference used by electromagnetic and mechanical finite-element solvers. We show how this strategy can be successfully applied to bulk and guided systems, comparing the results with the predictions of established theory.