Public competitions
Introduction
Tendering, in business terms, is the regulated process through which an organization publicly announces a need, requests offers that satisfy it, evaluates these offers and selects one of them. This word can also refer to an auction process.
Uses of the term
The Royal Spanish Academy defines bidding[1] as "action and effect of bidding", and bidding as:.
The tender, simply put, is therefore always public and competitive. When in Spanish you write "public tender" or "competitive public tender", "public" and "competitive" are epithets[2] (rhetorical adjectives that do not add information). The same thing happens when you write "bidding process" (the word implies the meaning of process).
Public tender is synonymous with bidding. On the other hand, public auction usually refers to a process in which assets (for example, judicially seized) are awarded to the highest bidder.
There is also restricted bidding, in which only certain previously selected companies are invited to participate, while in the plain bidding any company can participate from the outset, although, during the process, those that do not meet the established requirements may be discarded. The difference is important, because the company that is considered unfairly rejected in a tender can appeal to the courts.
Finally, the public nature (in its sense of general diffusion) of the tender does not mean that only the public sector can use it. It is a procedure commonly used by large private companies to hire other firms.
English Synonyms
In English, call for bids (CFB), call for tenders (CFT), invitation to tender (ITT, often shortened to tender or tendering, especially in British English), request for tender (RFT), invitation for bid (IFB) and competitive bidding process (CBP) are synonyms for bidding. The reason for this proliferation is found in the English word bid, which is used as a noun (offer, bid) and as a verb (offer, bid), and is very general. Therefore, when in English you want to say , you restrict that general term by writing one of the previous synonyms. But the Spanish translation of is not , but simply .