Notice ID: 1241902
“The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Office of Pharmaceutical Quality (OPQ), Office of Quality Surveillance (OQS) has a need for rapid and accurate translation of foreign documents into English. FDA often receives documents from foreign regulatory authorities and drug manufacturers in their native language that require translation into English before they can be assessed and relied on for regulatory decisions. Historically, FDA has used human translation services to translate such documents. This has proven to be time consuming and costly for the Agency. Technology around machine translation software has evolved enough to allow for replacement of human translation services with neural machine learning translation software. By training the software with previously translated documents by humans, the accuracy of the software can be improved and allow it to be used in place of the human translation services. Near instantaneous translations performed by neural machine translation software will enable FDA and will also cost significantly less per translation compared to human translation.”
“The objective is to enhance FDA’s Systran software for machine translation. This translation system was purchased, installed, and configured in FY2020. In order to continue enhancing the system to meet user’s needs it is necessary to add an additional 12 languages to the system for translation. FDA will continue to evaluate and enhance the system and then implement it for operational usage. This software product (or its equivalent) will enable nearly instantaneous foreign language translations into English in support of multiple FDA regulatory programs involving foreign drug manufacturing sites and foreign regulatory authorities.”
“The Contractor shall provide and install 12 additional languages that will meet the salient characteristics for the following: Systran Enterprise Server Additional Language Pairs 12. The Contractor shall ensure the software (equal to Systran Neural Machine Translation) meet the following salient functional characteristics: Accuracy. The language translation by the software shall be able to be trained using FDA technical language for improved accuracy…”
“The Contractor shall provide remote support for successful installation of the languages for the software…”
“The period of performance is one year (2/22/2021 – 2/21/2022) for the base year with 4 option years.”
