The European Parliament has selected Plunet as the new translation management system of the Directorate-General for Translation (DG TRAD). The contract is worth EUR 0.97m (USD 1.09m) and will start in mid-May 2019.
The contract was awarded after an expedited process rather than through the usual open, competitive tender due to time constraints. The award is particularly critical since DG TRAD’s current systems “are no longer technically viable, nor respond to the new business needs” and “must be decommissioned by the end of 2019,” according to the contract award notice.
Moreover, the contract award notice contends that “it would not be possible to develop a replacement system within the given time constraints.”
Plunet was singled out by DG TRAD “following a limited market analysis of translation management tools” and judged to be “a tool already available on the market corresponding to its business and IT requirements.” From here, DG TRAD engaged in a negotiated procedure with Plunet.
What will be deployed at DG TRAD is Plunet Business Manager, a translation workflow and business management solution that allows integration with productivity (CAT) tools. (Many EU institutions currently use SDL Trados Studio.) Plunet Business Manager will be used by DG TRAD’s external translation service, the section responsible for outsourcing translation work to external suppliers.
According to the contract award notice, the European Parliament considers a business-ready outsourcing workflow tool to be “critical for business continuity in DG TRAD in order to manage the external translation workload.” Little wonder since Parliament recently released a major tender for translation of hundreds of thousands of pages into 19 languages.
Plunet Head of Operations Sufian Reiter told Slator the official duration of the contract is two years and the level of customization of Plunet Business Manager would be “the minimum required to integrate with the EP systems.”
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