Home ›
The McElroy HUB: A New Era in Vendor Management
McElroy Translation pioneered vendor management many years ago. When Ralph McElroy founded the company in 1968, he established a culture in which translators and other vendors were considered critical for success. As a result, the company created translator friendly practices, such as regular payments (regardless of payment from the end-customer) and sophisticated task assignment processes, that empowered our vendors and assured that they were part of our overall language services team.
Now McElroy is expanding its vendor management program with The McElroy Hub. The Hub uses best-of-breed technologies to ensure that we match the most qualified vendor to every job. The goal: the right person for the right job at the right time. So whether you need a pharmaceutical translation, software localization, or any other type of technical translation, McElroy can pair you with appropriate specialists.
The Hub addresses vendor management from many angles, including vendor qualification, task assignment, reporting, and enhanced vendor relationship maintenance. Learn more.
Collaborative Translation Environment
Turnaround time is a key concern for many professional translation projects. Over the past year, there has been increasing “buzz” around a new “crowd-sourcing” approach that reduces turnaround by involving more translators, yet maintains quality by including lead translators as real-time consultants and adjudicators of terminology. In conjunction with The Hub, McElroy’s technology road map includes deploying a web-based, collaborative translation environment, which will allow us to employ this method in areas where it most benefits our clients.
Machine Translation
Statistical machine translation (SMT) is showing real progress with recent technical breakthroughs. It will be a long time (if ever) before SMT becomes an adequate substitute for human translation, but it is already an attractive alternative to “zero translation.” McElroy is pioneering innovative applications of SMT in multi-language discovery and information retrieval, where the challenge is first to identify material of interest and only then proceed to high-quality translation. SMT can also provide cost-effective leverage when large volumes of related material need to be translated. Our experts can help you determine whether SMT can be part of your overall translation solution.
One of the areas where innovative application of SMT technology can reduce cost and provide an improved solution is in the area of litigation support.
Translation Memory
CAT tools (computer-aided translation) automate extraction of the text to be translated from formatted source files. This enables translation, editing, and proofreading to be handled without having to work around formatting issues, particularly for DTP on website translation. Added benefits are the ability to automatically identify and reuse repetitious material, glossaries, and any segments that have been previously captured using a CAT tool, without regard for the source format. Then, when the translation is complete and verified, the CAT tool automatically replaces the original source segments in the formatted file with translated segments. In addition to the linguistic advantages, this process also speeds up the cycle and helps prevent cut/paste errors.
Get more information on the benefits of Translation Memory and how it works.
Litigation Support Services
The Problem: In today’s global economy, major litigation often transcends political and linguistic borders. Language services are now employed by legal teams throughout the litigation life cycle, but it is during the discovery phase, when the team sifts through a myriad of irrelevant documents looking for one or two key linkages that establish a case, that multilingual documents presents a real problem. E-Discovery tools lend some support, but they are not designed to across languages.
The McElroy Approach: McElroy’s innovative strategy combines the services of consulting linguists with machine translation to create a unified search space within which existing e-Discovery analysis tools can function. As documents of interest are identified, on-demand human translation can validate the relevance of the material. Certified translations admissible as evidence can also be provided when needed.