The "Africa i-Parliaments Action Plan" following up a request from the Pan African Parliament (PAP) to provide support to improve both timeliness and quality of their translation has began the procurement for the acquisition of "Computer Assisted Translation and Terminology Management Software" (CATTMS) software suite.

The CATTMS will support the PAP translator services in the production of faster, higher quality and more uniform translations. In agreement with PAP, the system, once set up, will also be available to African national parliaments that will also be able to benefit from the system.  The European Parliaments will provide technical assistance and support the training of PAP translators.

The solution is not only be a translation tool, but a highly customizable translation environment that includes terminology management designed to simplify the whole translation and translation management process. It deals with translations workflow part as well as translations management part, including web interface access for remote translators and allowing for import and export to standard file formats, including TMX.

The system will provide a simple, uniform and customisable user interface across all modules and include reporting features with a set of standard reports covering many different metrics, such as translation memory leverage, productivity of linguistic resources, job status etc. Standard reports should be customizable, and it would be an added advantage if completely customizable and ad hoc reports were implementable through query facilities or programmable access.

The procurement does also include professional services for installation and configuration; annual licence; maintenance and support; documentation and required training for implementation. It is foreseen that the installations and set-up will require 3 or 4 months.