Public Sector & International Organizations

Tender documentation prescribes the format, the certification, the delivery mechanism and often the qualifications the translators must hold. Meeting that specification is part of the deliverable. A technically excellent translation that misses a formal requirement is rejected without being read - which is why we read the procurement conditions before quoting rather than after winning.

EU institutions and international organizations maintain their own terminology and style guidance, and the expected term is whatever those sources say - not the best term a translator can find. Improving on institutional terminology is an error, and one that is immediately visible to the people reviewing the text.

Public-sector and institutional work is rarely a single language pair. It is twelve or twenty-two languages against one deadline, where a delay in any one holds up publication of all of them. That is a sequencing and project-management problem before it is a translation problem - and it is why a single point of accountability matters more here than anywhere else.