Provision of Language Technology Services

The Department for General Assembly and Conference Management (DGACM) of the United Nations enables the orderly and effective conduct of intergovernmental deliberations by providing procedural and technical secretariat support, authoritative advice and high‑quality conference services, including multilingual meeting and documentation services. These services are delivered to intergovernmental and expert bodies at United Nations Headquarters and at the United Nations Offices in Geneva, Vienna and Nairobi, as well as to conferences held elsewhere under United Nations auspices. DGACM also serves as the Secretariat‑wide coordinator for multilingualism, ensuring a coherent and consistent approach to this core United Nations value.

As part of its ongoing efforts to leverage the latest technology in multilingual documentation services, DGACM intends to procure: (1) Machine translation model APIs for integration into its internal computer assisted translation (CAT) system “eLUNa”, which is cloud-hosted on Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services and used by DGACM as well as other specialized agencies in the United Nations system (eLUNa processes approximately 300 million words per year and serves around 1,500 users across participating entities); (2) Machine translation quality evaluation APIs to automatically assess the quality of machine translation outputs; (3) Speech-to-text model APIs to convert the audio recordings of meetings into text (the total duration of meetings to be transcribed is approximately 3,000 hours per year); (4) Voice-to-voice model APIs for real-time multilingual meetings (the total duration of relevant meetings is approximately 18,000 hours per year); and (5) Pre-editing/pre-formatting APIs to automatically pre-edit/pre-format English files in accordance with predefined editorial rules and styles.

The objectives of the five components of this procurement exercise are as follows: (1) The machine translation APIs must support CAT‑oriented workflows and deliver accurate, fluent and high‑quality output for translation in the six official languages of the United Nations (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish) and German. (2) The machine translation quality evaluation APIs must support accurate and reliable assessment of machine translation outputs in the six official languages of the United Nations (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish) and German. (3) The speech-to-text APIs must support high quality automatic transcription in the official languages of the United Nations (Arabic, English, Chinese, French, Russian and Spanish), producing accurate text in the language of the audio input. (4) The voice-to-voice APIs must deliver accurate, fluent and high‑quality output in the six official languages of the United Nations (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish). (5) The pre-editing/pre-formatting APIs must support the correct application of the predefined editorial rules and styles to unedited and unformatted English files.

In addition, the solutions must meet technical expectations for high performance, reliability and scalability under heavy load and concurrent usage. Strict data protection is required: United Nations content must not be retained, logged in a manner that exposes text or used for training or any other purpose without explicit written consent, and must be processed under secure transport and access controls.

Companies who can provide at least one component (i.e. machine translation, machine translation quality evaluation, speech-to-text or voice-to-voice, in at least one of the UN official languages or German (if applicable), or pre-editing/pre-formatting, in English) can submit and confirm your interest in UNGM.

Specific Requirements/Information

Please note that this EOI is not an invitation for submission of tenders. Its purpose is to identify companies that would be interested and eligible to participate in the solicitation when issued. The complete details of the requirement will be provided in the tender documents that will be issued to bidders after this request for EOI is closed.

Procurement Division (PD), UNHQ reserves the right in selecting the invitees for the competitive bidding based on substantial and proven records of performance in the subject field of activities and mere expressing an interest would not automatically warrant for solicitation document. Vendors that are deemed qualified upon completion of an objective evaluation of their EOI submission will receive the final tender solicitation documents.