Blog · 26 September 2026 · 3 min read

Searching tenders in other languages: why English keywords miss most European tenders

European buyers write tenders in their own languages and word forms. Why English keywords miss most of them, and how to search across languages.

Most suppliers search for tenders in English, or in their own language. Most European tenders are written in neither. A Polish police unit buying drones writes in Polish, a Ukrainian military unit in Ukrainian, a Swedish agency in Swedish. An English keyword search sees a small slice of the market and makes it look like the whole of it.

One product, many names

Here is how buyers in different countries might describe the same thing — an unmanned aircraft, a drone:

A search for "drone" catches some of these by luck — several languages borrowed the word — and misses the formal terms that official tenders often prefer.

Words change their endings

Translation is only half of it. In many European languages a word's ending changes with its role in the sentence:

• Lithuanian: dronas (a drone), dronų (of drones), bepiločių orlaivių (of unmanned aircraft).
• Ukrainian: дрон (a drone), дронів (of drones), БпЛА as an abbreviation that stays the same.
• Polish: dron, dronów, bezzałogowych statków powietrznych.

A tender title is usually a phrase like "Purchase of drones", so the word appears in exactly the form an exact-match search does not expect. This is one reason keyword alerts in Central and Eastern European markets feel so quiet.

Abbreviations and codes

Buyers love abbreviations: UAV, UAS, BSP, БпЛА, EO/IR, C-UAS. They are useful search terms, but short ones need care — searching "ISR" as a bare string also finds every word that contains those letters. Search for them as whole words.

CPV codes help because they are the same in every language. A buyer in Portugal and a buyer in Finland pick from the same list. But CPV codes are broad, buyers don't always pick the most precise one, and many notices outside the EU don't use them at all. Use them alongside words, not instead of them.

Brand names never appear

A buyer writes what they need, not whose product they want — public procurement rules usually require exactly that. So your product name, however well known, is almost never in a tender. Machine-translating your brand name into ten languages doesn't help either: the translation still contains the brand. Start from the kind of item, then translate that.

How to search across languages

1. Describe the item generically in English: what it is, what it does, common abbreviations.
2. Get the terms a buyer would use in each market. Colleagues, local partners and distributors are the best source; machine translation is a starting point, not an answer. Check the formal term as well as the everyday one.
3. Cover the word forms. Search for word stems where the portal allows it, or add the common plural and "of …" forms.
4. Add CPV codes for the item.
5. Beware of opposites and near-misses. "Counter-drone systems" and "drone detectors" contain the word "drone" but are a different market. So is "drone maintenance" if you sell drones rather than service them.
6. Test against real tenders. Look at a few months of notices from each market and check what your terms find — and what they miss.

This is exactly the part software is good at: understanding that БпЛА, bepiločių orlaivių and Drohnen all describe your product, without you having to maintain the list. When you evaluate a tender monitoring service, ask to see what it finds for your products in a language you don't speak.

For the wider picture, see How to find defence tenders in Europe and Tender alerts: how to stop checking 20 portals by hand.