A headline in The Moscow Times:
Billionaire Rotenberg Wins Tender for Moscow to St. Petersburg
Highway
But tender, per dictionaries, means "a (bidder's) offer to do something".
So I'm curious, is the quoted usage of tender appropriate? Is it passable? If not, how does one go expressing the meaning while retaining some mention of a tender-based selection process? "Wins contract"?
And how does one go about saying in a headline that the Government has announced an international .. tender-process-driven contest (that's a mouthful) to build a plant?
In Russian, the word tender (тендер, a borrowing from English) is never used to denote an offer on part of a bidder to provide goods or services. It always refers to the process of selection among bidders, to the contest. So a translator has to struggle with sentences in the original language that are peppered with tenders thusly employed: "the company has won a tender to build a plant"; "an international tender has been announced" etc.
However, in an Australian source I've met this sentence in which the use of tender is also seemingly unrelated to the bidder's tender:
City of Stonnington , Victoria, has issued a tender for drain
construction in Glen Iris, Melbourne
Is that a shortening of "request for tenders"?
Another Australian source, a couple of unorthodox usages of tender:
How to win contracts and tenders
The prospect of competing for public tenders can be daunting for
up-and-coming SMEs. …
How could one "compete for public tenders" if a tender is an offer on part of a candidate company to do work, provide services?
To look from another angle, there are many instances of "company wins bid to.." in headlinese. A bid is analogous to tender, so why not "company wins tender to.." ?
Best Answer
The formal (financial) usage in these contexts is "tender offer." This basically means "bid." "Tender" is the adjective and "offer" is the noun.
But "tender offer" is often abbreviated to "tender." So the billionaire won his "tender" or bid to build the Moscow St. Petersburg Highway.