Translate a tender document into Spanish

Procurement vocabulary differs across the Spanish-speaking world

A Spanish-speaking contracting authority expects each document under its own name. In Spain, a tender is a licitación, governed by the pliego de cláusulas administrativas particulares (PCAP, the administrative terms) and the pliego de prescripciones técnicas (PPT, the technical specification). In Latin America the tender pack may be called bases de licitación, pliego de condiciones or convocatoria, depending on the country. Closest equivalents for common bid documents:

• ESPD → DEUC (Documento Europeo Único de Contratación), for an EU buyer;
• technical proposal / method statement → memoria técnica;
• price schedule → cuadro de precios;
• financial offer form → proposición económica.

None of these maps perfectly. The safest rule is to mirror the terms used in the buyer's own tender documents. Spanish tenders also often split the bid into separate sobres (envelopes): administrative documents, criteria assessed by judgement, and formula-based criteria. Make sure each translated file goes in the right one.

Figures, amounts and dates: where Spanish bids go wrong

A misplaced separator in a price schedule can make an offer inconsistent. Conventions depend on the buyer's country:

• Spain: decimal comma, full stop for thousands, currency after the figure: 1.250.000,50 €;
• Mexico and several Central American countries: the reverse, 1,250,000.50;
• large round numbers take “de”: 1 millón de euros, but 1.500 euros;
• VAT becomes IVA; always state IVA excluido or IVA incluido;
• months are lower case (15 de marzo) and short dates run day/month/year, which trips up readers used to US dates.

After translation, check that the totals in your cuadro de precios match those quoted in the memoria técnica and the proposición económica, to the cent.

Register, length and formatting

A Spanish technical proposal uses formal administrative register: usted when addressing the buyer, and frequent impersonal constructions. “We will provide a team of five” reads naturally as La empresa propone un equipo de cinco personas.

Spanish runs noticeably longer than English and about the same length as French. If the pliego caps the memoria técnica at a set number of pages, an English proposal already at the limit will overrun in Spanish: check the pagination of the delivered file and trim if needed.

Two typographic details give away an unreviewed translation:

• headings capitalise only the first word: Memoria técnica, not Memoria Técnica;
• clarification questions to the buyer open with an inverted mark: ¿Puede confirmarse el plazo de ejecución?

What Manuce delivers, and what it does not

Your documents go to Dédale, the engine specialised in technical text. You can upload Word, PDF, PowerPoint, Excel, plain text, Markdown, HTML, RTF or CSV; each file comes back in its original format with its layout: price schedules stay Excel workbooks, proposals stay Word documents. A tender response of around 9,000 words (about 30 pages) counts as a standard document, delivered within minutes and kept in your client area.

What Manuce does not do:

• it cannot read scanned PDFs (images with no selectable text), which is how certificates and signed declarations often arrive;
• it does not produce sworn translations. Some Spanish-speaking authorities require a traducción jurada for supporting documents issued abroad: check the language clause in the pliego and send those items to a sworn translator;
• it does not take glossaries or terminology instructions. For a product name or acronym that must stay unchanged, check it in the free sample and again in the delivered translation.

Preparing the files and checking before submission

1. Keep each bid document as a separate file: proposal, price schedule, references, programme.
2. Replace scanned PDFs with source files or PDFs with selectable text.
3. Use the free sample on a paragraph dense with acronyms and product names, so you can see how they are handled.
4. After delivery, check amounts, separators, the submission deadline (plazo de presentación) and that totals agree across documents.
5. For a Latin American buyer, have country-specific terms reviewed locally: a Mexican tender pack does not use the same wording as a Chilean one.

For a bid you will submit as is, the Professional level, handled by the domain specialist, is the one intended for documents ready to send.

In practice

1. Gather your bid documents as separate files (Word, Excel, PDFs with selectable text).
2. Upload them to Manuce and choose Spanish: the quote appears based on the exact word count.
3. Read the free translated paragraph, checking acronyms and product names.
4. Pay, then download the translated files in their original format.
5. Check amounts, decimal separators, dates and matching totals before submitting.