European Union Issues EUR 5.6m Translation Tender

The Translation Centre for the Bodies of the European Union (Translation Centre) published on December 14, 2017 a EUR 5.6m (USD 6.5m) call for tender for translation services in the legal field.

As the provider of linguistic shared services to EU agencies, the Translation Centre translates around 750,000 pages of documents per year on average and has a projected budget of EUR 47.7m (USD 56m) in 2018.

The new project involves the translation of legal text, including legal documents of ongoing proceedings, decisions of various legal bodies, legal opinion, and other texts that deal with EU or national laws.

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Translation services will be delivered under framework agreements and cover four projects —  translating texts from English and French into German (EUR 450,000), translating text from English to Spanish (EUR 200,000), translating texts from German, French and Italian into English (EUR 2.25m), and translating texts from German, English, Spanish and Italian into French (EUR 2.7m EUR).

This call for tenders is divided into lots and tenderers may bid for one or several lots and must make a price offer to be expressed in euro (EUR) per 1,500 characters. While there is no estimate on the volume of work, the tender documents specified that tenderers must have “a high level of general linguistic competence and familiarity with specialist terminology.”

Contractors are also required to have a translation experience equivalent to 2,000 standard pages and each translator who will be working on the project must have a university degree or equivalent qualification in translation and languages or law.

Since the Translation Centre uses SDL Trados for the translation of text, they also require contractors to be familiar with the translation management software or be able to work with a compatible TMS.

The opening of tenders is set on February 8, 2018. Contracts for the winning bidders will be for a duration of 12 months but may be renewed.