The Client
The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) is an international professional body headquartered in the United Kingdom, and one of the most widely recognised organisations for setting professional standards and accrediting competence across surveying, real estate, construction, and geospatial information worldwide. For a client with this level of international standing, no document bearing their name is judged as merely “acceptable” — it is judged against the standard the name itself carries wherever it appears.
Fast Trans was commissioned to translate a technical proposal the institution was submitting to a Saudi government authority, as part of a government tender process that allowed no delay in delivery and no margin for error in format or terminology. A project of this kind is not measured by translation quality alone, but by whether the Arabic document can be read and evaluated by a technical committee as though it had been written in Arabic from the start.
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250
pages
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48
hour turnaround
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369
headings & sections
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2,990
table cells
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The Challenge
Four Requirements Had to Be Met
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01 Preserving the Template With Zero Margin for Error
The document is a tender submission filed exactly as delivered to a government body — no room for later rewriting or correction after submission; the Arabic version had to land in the exact same template, character for character.
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02 Numbering & Table Accuracy Across 250 Pages
The document spans 369 sections and headings and 2,990 table cells; a single shifted number or a broken table is enough to distort the committee’s impression of the whole submission.
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03 Terminology Consistency Across a Distributed Team
Surveying and geospatial-information terms leave no room for individual judgment calls; a distributed team has to use the same term the same way, section to section.
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04 A Tight Delivery Window
A document this size normally needs weeks of staged work, while the team had a window measured in hours, not days.
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What We Did
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01
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Building an Approved Terminology Glossary
Before the first line was translated, so the whole team worked from one unified reference from day one, rather than reconciling terms later.
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02
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Splitting Work Across Parallel Teams
Each team responsible for independent sections, so work proceeded simultaneously instead of waiting on the team before it.
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03
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Dual Editing & Single-Reader Proofread
Proofread of the Arabic text alone, independent of the English — exactly as the receiving committee would read it.
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04
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Automated Structural-Matching Gate
Reviewed headings, table cells, and numbering before delivery, confirming all 369 headings and 2,990 table cells landed back in place.
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The Result, in Numbers
Delivered in 48 Hours With Zero Margin for Error in Format
We delivered the complete document within 48 hours — roughly 125 pages a day — with the structure fully intact: every heading and every table cell in place. The document went to submission with no reformatting required on the client’s side.
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0
errors in heading or table numbering
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1
unified-format Arabic version
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No reformatting
submission-ready as delivered
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Glossary + matching gate
a repeatable method
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Client Quote
“We are very satisfied with your services so far — professional translation, responsive communication by email and WhatsApp, and on-time delivery. If you keep delivering this level of quality, we would be glad to work with you again for our translation needs in the region.”
— RICS, June 2026
What This Means for You
If you’re preparing a technical proposal for a government tender with a tight deadline, the real question isn’t just “can you translate this fast enough?” — it’s “can you hold accuracy and format together under that kind of pressure?” What proves quality here is a repeatable, concrete step: an actual structural-matching gate that reviews every element in the document before delivery, not after.
The same lesson applies to any multi-section official document translated under time pressure: a unified glossary and automated structural review aren’t a nice-to-have — they’re what separates a document that gets accepted as delivered from one that gets sent back for reformatting before it ever reaches the committee’s table.
Do you have a tender document or technical proposal with a deadline that can’t slip? Get in touch with Fast Trans today to discuss your project’s scope and delivery timeline.