Mark Ritter, CLO
I should get a T-shirt that says “Non-Native Texan” because I’ve lived here longer than anywhere else. I loved the Austin atmosphere as a grad student during the 1970s. When I returned after an academic career, I suppose I was trying to recover that. Of course, you can’t go back home, even if it’s a second home. Austin was a very different place the second time around, but I still like it better than any realistic alternative.
Oddly enough, I never translated German when I was a grad student or when I taught the language full-time. I started to in a serious way after my return to Austin, in addition to taking courses in computer science (reconnecting with my undergraduate studies in mathematics) and teaching part-time. At first I translated articles and books in the humanities, but after I began working for McElroy as a part-time editor in 1990, I gradually switched to technical subject matter, which is all I work with now.
I became a freelance translator—but actually mostly worked for McElroy—starting in late 1997, and enjoyed it. Nonetheless, I was pleased to rejoin the company staff in 1999 when Shelly Priebe invited me to be chief editor. I worked in that position for nearly 10 years. The editing department is a wonderful group to manage, both those who were there before I started and are still here, and the colleagues who have joined us since then. There were very few days when I wasn’t happy to go to work, something not many people can honestly say.
For a while all this seemed very stable and comfortable, but then two things happened to me that I would have considered very improbable when I became chief editor: I got married nearly five years ago and then Nevin and I had a son about a year ago. Derin is wonderful, even if he does remind us from time to time that there’s a good reason why people normally start having children in their twenties and not a decade or three later.
Late last year, my professional life changed just as dramatically. Shelly challenged me to think about a new position in which I would devote most of my time to translation and translator development. And so I acquired the title of chief linguistic officer. This position grew out of the realization that the market demands that we adopt new approaches to what we do if we are to grow and thrive. We need to integrate translation technology into as many aspects of our work as we can. We need to embrace oncoming technologies like statistical machine translation, which promises to complement, not supplant our core competence. Helping our clients sort through amounts of documents so large that they literally don’t know where to start translation has the potential to increase our high quality human translation business exponentially. Other efficiencies that will enhance our competitiveness may result as well.
At the same time we know that all the software in the world can’t produce high-quality human translations without highly skilled translators, which brings me to the other half of my job. I am working with our project management office (PMO) to help our existing translators become more productive and to bring new translators into our pool. We will do this by developing the potential of McElroyHUBSM for interaction between translators and, maybe even more important, between translators and our in-house editing and production staff. After all, our clients just want the best translations they can get, at a competitive price and on time. Delivering to clients what they want and need is the challenge every one of us faces every day—my job is equip all our stakeholders with what they need to succeed.
