Working with the UN was our dream even before Russian Translation Company was created. We found inspiration in helping people, companies and nations understand each other. What is more, the UN is very particular when it comes to selecting translators. Being a UN vendor is a mark of quality. We were, of course, very keen to prove we were worthy of it.

Russian Translation Company won its first tender to provide translation services for the UN Headquarters in New York in 2014. The bidding process, from the invitation to bid to the conclusion of a contract, took nearly 18 months. We had to collect a veritable mountain of documents, perform several test assignments, and endure difficult negotiations with the procurement division. Later, we found out the pool of corporate vendors of Russian translation services had not changed for 20 years. The UN even sent representatives all the way to Moscow to have a look at the ‘newcomers.’

But it turned out that winning the bid was the easy bit. Before we started working with the UN, we had to go through all the style guides and glossaries that had been accumulated by the UN translation service team over the course of decades. RPK staff got in touch with the UN in-house terminologist and team of editors and studied the necessary software:

• the UNTERM terminology portal
• the eLuna computer-assisted translation tool, which allows us to search the entire UN document system quickly and efficiently.