All McElroy staff interact with our workflow system and can access key technology components to plan ahead for jobs and tasks coming through the system. Typical projects follow this standard workflow process.
McElroy’s workflow system objectives include:
• For it to be flexible enough to handle all kinds of document types, including those which are not directly editable.
• To have the ability to design processes in advance that can be executed with little or no PM intervention.
• To be able to create “alert” style reporting that warns of jobs at risk of delay at the earliest possible moment, allowing for even more timely corrective action.
• Being able to manage translator (or other contractor) qualifications at a very fundamental level. Automatic rules offer ongoing jobs only to those who have been prequalified for a particular client’s work be it pharmaceutical translation or legal translation. (This is handled through custom coding and represents a key competitive advantage over standard TMS offerings … even those that claim to manage capacity in some way.)
• Managing the interaction with translators (and other contractors) including offering/claiming jobs, delivering translator kits, receiving finished work, generating purchase orders, and ensuring that invoices are properly submitted, to allow translators to monitor upcoming and recently past workload as well as invoice payment status, and maintaining a complete log of all contact with each contractor.
Benefits to clients include:
• For large or ongoing work, having a portal to submit jobs directly, retrieve finished products, track project status, and other features.
• Cycle time being reduced due to the parallel approach for assigning jobs.
• Additional cycle time and/or cost being reduced over time for clients who have not traditionally benefited from TM (translation memory) as we reap the benefits of our TM Enhancement and automated TM analysis steps.
• Processing errors being greatly reduced.
Flowchart that illustrates McElroy’s workflow for more complex projects
Would you like to see how McElroy’s new integrated hub system is designed to positively impact production capabilities?
• Linguists create a log-in, enter their profile, and are assigned a sample translation. McElroy’s Project Management Office (PMO) selects linguists for completion of the linguist checklist. PMO uses this searchable database to target certain skill sets based on projects we receive, and these opportunities are made available to prequalified linguists.
• PMO staff are able to define workflows in as much detail and as many variations as are needed. These can target particular file types with complex processing requirements, particular job types (such as those with lots of extra production or quality control steps), particular customers with unique requirements, particular fields such as chemical translation or software localization, etc. PMO can also create and maintain translator workgroups for projects and relate those to workflows in such a way as to completely automate the translator assignment step(s). They can also use the interaction history to evaluate quality and reliability, and assign ratings that can then be used in creating translator workgroups.
• Customers will be able to submit jobs directly through a customer portal, but the real benefit will be in creating customized workflows on both sides that automatically cause content to flow back and forth. For instance, a customer whose CMS supports change triggers for batching and submitting jobs could easily configure that system to drop those documents directly into a predefined WorldServer workflow and kick off a translation services project with no manual intervention. The appropriate customer contact would be notified (per rules defined in the workflow) that the job is in progress. When it is completed, the professional translation would automatically flow back into the CMS for final review and approval, staging, and publication.
• Within the system, any workflow that involves TM analysis, MT, TM Enhancement, third party analytics (such as searching, filtering, etc.), or custom steps (such as automated optical character recognition or other file conversion steps) would simply happen on schedule with no human interaction required. The up-front work of defining the workflow itself will result in long-term/ongoing efficiencies. Even TM maintenance will be much more consistent and efficient under this approach.
Quality Process Steps
The Basics
1. Careful translator selection: the right person for the right job. McElroy provides resources, training and guidelines. Translator quality is tracked and measured.
2. Following translation, each document is reviewed by a qualified editor to ensure technical accuracy. For translations from English into another language, a second translator reviews the translation to ensure technical accuracy and address issues of language nuance.
3. Document and web specialists implement revisions, execute formatting and recreate graphics. Our production staff efficiently reproduce online formats and desktop-published material.
4. A proofreader provides a third quality check. This review confirms that editing changes and formatting were properly implemented and that there are no omissions or typographical errors.
5. For clients in certain sectors that must comply with specific regulations McElroy also provides bidirectional translation, using back-to-English translation as an additional validation process.