Last month, Austin-based language service provider McElroy Translations announced that it had promoted its Chief Editor to Chief Language Officer, a new title in the constellation of corner-office executives. If the title catches on, the company’s new “CLO” will have to fight for his abbreviated moniker with the Chief Learning Officer sitting down the hall. What does this title escalation or inflation mean to the language services sector?

Title inflation either recognizes that someone has risen beyond his peers (Senior Executive Plenipotentiary Vice President of Thinking Big Thoughts) or that there’s a new function that requires focused attention. In late 2006, Cisco took our advice on global leadership and appointed Wim Elfrink to be its Chief Globalization Officer, responsible for supporting new market growth around the globe. McElroy found a similar need to isolate and provision a new role, promoting Mark Ritter, who had been overseeing a traditional quality assurance function, to a C-level executive.

According to president Shelly Priebe, the CLO will play a strategic role in reviewing all aspects of McElroy’s language output, including vendor training, feedback, and technology integration. The bottom line for the CLO is assuring the quality of the company’s offering. As we’ve outlined in reports such as “The Buyer-Supplier Quality Gap,” quality is whatever the client says it is. As CLO, Ritter’s primary directive will be making sure that McElroy meets customer expectations for this elusive attribute. Ideally, he will also set an agenda for other LSPs to emulate.

Promoting Ritter to the CLO role is not McElroy’s first attempt to change the rules for LSPs. Two years ago, the company brought in strategy VP Bob Donaldson, a lapsed Slavicist who had paid the rent for the last 25 years managing software engineering groups at a variety of companies. Since arriving at McElroy, he has gradually replaced the company’s translation, workflow, and vendor management solutions with a best-of-breed captive translation management system incorporating technology from innovators such as Asia Online (statistical machine translation), Clay Tablet (middleware), Force.com (the Salesforce application development platform), and Kilgray (translation memory).  The “McElroy Hub” that he developed also incorporates crowdsourcing concepts, thus allowing the company’s freelancers to benefit from each others’ expertise and share its stock of translation tools.

When shopping for translation services, we’ve found that buyers often confuse one supplier with another, largely because few can successfully differentiate themselves. If the CLO’s remit does stretch into strategy and innovation, and the company continues its investment in identifying and integrating the best technology to serve its customers, McElroy will be well-positioned to distinguish itself from its many competitors in the language services industry.