So You’re the CLO—What’s That?
Mark Ritter, CLO
Recently our President, Shelly Priebe, asked me to consider taking on the newly created role of Chief Language Officer. It was flattering, but also daunting, like anything new. But then I realized that Shelly’s challenge wasn’t about me—it was about our company. The increasing pace of change in the language services market required a creative response to the key question: What does it take for us to provide our clients with the language solutions they need, when they need them, and at a competitive price?
First, we needed to create a seamless technological web linking our contractors and our in-house staff from project intake to delivery. We chose the MemoQ translation environment tool, in combination with our proprietary ELJOTS.Force workflow management platform. The linchpin of the system is called, appropriately enough, the McElroy HUB. My job is to find ways to harness all this technology to improve our quality from end to end.
Interactivity is the cornerstone of our effort. Now we can capture all the editing we do in-house and leverage it in future work. Our translators will be able to access the editing as well as the work of our linguists via the MemoQ server. We have over 50 person-years of experience on our in-house technical editing staff. Our translators have an equally impressive store of knowledge. Let’s put them together!
As we move further and further away from the traditional back-loaded quality-control model of editing towards a front-loaded quality-assurance approach, we will be able to provide faster turn times and better quality with less drudgery for everyone. The potential of the MemoQ server and the HUB will allow new types of collaboration between translators, and between translators and in-house editors.
As important as translation is and always will be to us, it isn’t necessarily the solution to every client’s linguistic problem. Sometimes clients are swamped in a sea of data and what they really need is a linguistic lifeboat. We also are working with cutting-edge statistical machine translation strategies—our (McElroy+Machine) Translation suite of services—for exactly this type of situation. My role is to devise strategies for incorporating our linguistic expertise into the automated translation workflow on the front end. We are then able to sift through the data and pick out only what really needs to be translated. We’re working on several initiatives in this area right now. I’m excited about where this takes the McElroy team and what it can do for our clients.
