Translation Services

STATEMENT OF WORK
Translation Services – English to French
Background
As the federal regional economic department for Western Canada, Western Economic Diversification Canada (WD) has a mandate to promote the development and diversification of the economy of the West (British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba) and to advance the interests of Western Canada in national economic policy, program and project development and implementation. WD works to improve the long-term economic competitiveness of the West and the quality of life of its citizens by supporting a wide range of initiatives targeting inter-related programs – business development,   innovation, and community economic development. These programs and services are supported by WD's policy, advocacy and coordination, and internal services. Together, these priorities create a foundation to build the prosperity and competitiveness of the West in the 21st century. WD’s corporate office is located in Edmonton with offices in Vancouver, Calgary, Saskatoon, Winnipeg and Ottawa.

WD regularly produces press releases, backgrounders, speeches, brochures, publicity materials, solicitation documents, and other documents related to departmental operations, such as policies, procedures, human resources, financial statements, etc. As a federal department, WD has a legislative obligation to provide all public and most internal documents in both official lan-guages. Therefore, translated versions must reflect a high quality standard established for communication products and designed for various public entities and individuals. The required services must often be provided under tight deadlines, including during the evening and on weekends, and the volume of work to be dealt with is often significant.

WD requires the services of qualified suppliers to provide translation, revision and related services for specific publications and information products. These products are disseminated externally and internally, in print and/or electronic formats, depending on the needs of the specific target audiences. Products include policy position papers, discussion papers, reports, briefing notes, communication products (news releases, speeches, media advisories, etc.), and other documents. The documents may combine text with tables, graphics and special layout requirements, depending on the medium/media used.

The total annual dollar value of contracted translation and revision services, including comparative editing, at WD is estimated at $150,000.00 per year.

Objective
WD intends to award up to five (5) Task Authorization contracts for the services required to complete the Work, associated with Translation Services, including comparative revision. Task Authorizations will be issued on an “as needed” basis from the date of contract award to March 31, 2015, with four (4), one year (1) options to extend.

Option Year 1	April 1, 2015 - March 31, 2016
Option Year 2	April 1, 2016 – March 31, 2017
Option Year 3	April 1, 2017 – March 31, 2018
Option Year 4	April 1, 2018 – March 31, 2019
Scope of Work
The Contractors will provide WD, on an “as needed” basis, with timely professional services: translation, revision, proofreading, quality control and adaptation services of English texts into French and of French texts into English..

More specifically, the Contractor will:

•	Provide translation services, mainly from English to French, with a translation capacity of 2000 words in a 7.5 hour period, without resorting to the use of automatic translation. Texts that obviously have been translated using automatic translation software will fail quality control and will be deemed unsatisfactory and treated as such.   

•	Provide editing services, correcting spelling and grammatical errors, style, syntax, struc-ture and uniformity, in accordance with French language standards using Le guide du rédacteur from the Translation Bureau, and other recognized French language writing tools as reference.

•	Proofread texts ensuring that they reflect originals when re-transcribed or transposed in various mediums.

•	Provide quality control services through a second edit.

•	Adapt in French, texts written in English, respecting the original content, and taking into account the expectations of the client.

•	Compare translation to originals to ensure integrity, accuracy and quality of texts, which are distributed simultaneously. Insert in the translated text all missing words or parts of the original text.

•	Meet the production deadlines as specified by WD, which can be very tight (sometimes within the hour).

•	Deliver documents in an electronic version on a compatible electronic medium and/or paper, to respect the formatting and layout of the original (unless otherwise indicated).

•	Be able to respond, frequently within very short deadlines, to urgent requests for ser-vices, driven by WD’s obligations, unannounced administrative demands, etc. On occa-sion the Contractor may be asked to work in the evening or on weekends.

Volume
Contractor should note that the services delivered under the proposed Task Authorization Contract will be on an “as needed” basis. The amount of work associated with the services in the Contract is fully dependent upon the demands. WD does not imply nor warrant that it will require the Contractor’s services to the maximum value of the Contract.

The Contractor must be able to translate approximately 2,000 words over a period of 7.5 hours; this includes receipt of the source text, revision of the translation and delivery of the translated text. The word volume of the Contract will be the number of words demanded by WD. For large documents, sections may have to be delivered according to a specific timeline.  

Linguistic Quality and Terminology Uniformity
The quality of the work delivered under the Contract must meet the following criteria and be to the satisfaction of the WD Translation and Revision Services personnel. The Contractor must:

1.	Use an elegant style and language appropriate to the target audience that accurately renders the message of the source text.

2.	Ensure that the work contains consistent terminology and assign, whenever possible, certain documents or group of related documents to the same translator(s) to achieve consistent terminology.

3.	Ensure that the work contains standardized and consistent terminology when using the services of more than one translator, while respecting the prescribed deadlines.

4.	Meet the prescribed Work Due Date for delivery of the work, as specified in the ap-proved Task Authorization.

5.	Deliver work that is free from major errors, notably the following mistakes:
a.	misinterpretation – when one word is used instead of another in the same lexical field (for example, a word is translated as “house” where “mansion” or “castle” would be expected) or in an entirely different category;  
b.	barbarism – a word or expression not standard in the language; 
c.	mistranslation – a translation that means the contrary of the idea expressed in the source text (calque, faux sense, contre-sens); 
d.	nonsense – language or style that is incorrect or unclear;
e.	additions – an element appears in the target text that is not in the source text;
f.	omissions – an element that appears in the source text but not in the target text.

6.	Deliver work that contains no more than two (2) minor errors for every 400 words of translated text. Minor errors are defined as grammar, punctuation and spelling mistakes.

7.	Deliver the word in the application, format style and layout of the source document pro-vided by the WD Translation and Revision Services personnel. In addition the following conditions must be adhered to:
a.	no conversions will be accepted in any form;  
b.	it will not be possible to convert texts from one type of operating system to an-other or to save texts in an earlier or later version of the source document appli-cation(s); 
c.	the Contactor shall use virus detection and elimination systems and agree to take the necessary measures to ensure the delivery of translations through electronic media or other systems that are virus-free; and
d.	the Contractor must not use unauthorized codes in word processing, tables etc.

8.	The Contractor will carry out quality control and editing before delivering the work to meet the above conditions.

 
Place of Work Located in Canada
The Contractor’s place of work must be in Canada. As required by WD, the Contractor may have to work on specific translation and/or revision projects in WD’s offices, in the Canada’s Na-tional Capital Region. If applicable, travel expenses will be reimbursed in accordance with the Treasury Board Travel Directive, without any allowance therein for overhead or profit. 

Required Software and Layout
The Contractor shall translate, revise and deliver the texts in the format, style and layout of the source texts, without conversion, using the software that the client requested for the target texts, usually a specific version of Word, Excel or PowerPoint. If the source text is in HTML or PDF format, the Contractor shall translate or revise the text with a software program chosen in con-junction with WD, respecting the original formatting as much as possible. 

Also, the Contractor shall use a virus detection and elimination system. The Contractor agrees not to insert unauthorized codes into texts, tables, etc., and to take all necessary measures to deliver the texts on media or by electronic means that are free of viruses. 

Quality Control
Contractor and its team must perform quality control on the executed work in order to assure that the material being delivered meets a level of professional standard.

Subcontracting
Subcontracting is not allowed for the completion of the work. By submitting a proposal, the Contractor agrees not to subcontract any work. Any breach of this condition may lead to the cancellation of the contract. 

Constraints
1.	The Contractor must have access to the Internet and have a means of receiving and sending large documents via e-mail.

2.	The Contractor may be required to provide on-site linguistic services at WD’s Ottawa Of-fice, at 141 Laurier Avenue West, 5th floor, Ottawa, Ontario.

3.	On an “as needed” basis, the Contractor may be required to provide the services on an urgent basis during the evenings, weekends and statutory holidays.

Client Support
WD agrees to provide the Contractor with any information it may have that is not on the organization’s internet site that pertains to the document to be translated (publications, electronic or hardcopy versions of reports) and WD terminology. However, WD cannot provide research services on terminology or official names unrelated to WD. Furthermore, research for the translation of bibliographies contained in the documents to be translated shall be the Contractor’s responsibility. WD assumes that the Contractor possesses all the necessary tools for this kind of work.

Documentation and Terminology
WD will provide the Contractor with access to its terminology lexicon on an external communications network. The Contractor will be required to send to WD, with the translated text (in a separate file or using comment bubbles in the text), the equivalents of the terminological units found in the text to be translated that are not in Termium Plus or any other terminology source. 

Deliverables
The work must be done using the software version requested or using the same software used in the original text.

Deadlines for required services will be specified in the Task Authorization and agreed to between the WD and the Contractor. 
•	If the deadline is identified as “by end of business day”, the time specified is 5 p.m. Ot-tawa local time, unless the WD Translation and Revision Services personnel have nego-tiated a different deadline. 
•	No deadline will be extended without the prior approval of the WD Translation and Revi-sion Services personnel. If the WD Translation and Revision Services personnel cannot be reached or is not in a position to grant the requested extension, the document must be delivered within the deadline initially agreed upon.

Delivery must be done either by e-mail at the specified e-mail address or by another secure means of delivery. If delivery problems occur, the Contractor must do everything necessary to provide WD with a copy of the translation within the deadline (for example, send an electronic version by courier).

Meetings and Travel
Contractor may be required to participate in meetings with the WD Representative in Ottawa either by telephone or in person. If applicable, travel expenses will be reimbursed in accordance with the Treasury Board Travel Directive, without any allowance therein for overhead or profit.

Official Languages
The Contractor shall be fluent in both official languages, with a professional working proficiency in oral and written English as well as professional French language skills.

Inspection/Acceptance
The work provided under each Task Authorization shall be subject to evaluation and acceptance by the Client, and feedback may be provided as needed.