In September I went to Madison, Wisconsin to take the ATA (American Translators Association) certification exam. There were about 20 of us taking it at one of the university facilities. Many language pairs were represented. Spanish and French were the most common. I may have been the only person there doing German-English.
Until recently, ATA exams were purely paper-and-book affairs. This was one of the new computer exams, so we each brought our own laptop and had to write our translation in Wordpad (because it has fewer special features than Word).
Preparation and anxiety levels varied quite a bit among the test takers. One gentleman arrived early and wheeled in a big suitcase filled with every conceivable reference book. These he proceeded to arrange in careful piles before the test. My immediate neighbor, on the other hand, strolled in about 10 minutes before start time with nothing but his laptop and two pocket dictionaries. He sat back looking cool while others were doing pranayama, praying to St. Jerome, making deer-in-headlights faces, etc. I bet he either passed with flying colors or failed miserably.
There were three vigilant proctors. Their job is to meander around the room making sure no one is using unauthorized websites or engaging in any other translation-related mischief.
We received a paper packet with three passages, from which we selected two for translation. My choices were a formal magazine article, a scientific passage, and a chatty, informal magazine article. At first I decided to avoid that last one because the informality seemed to entail a risk of too many judgment calls with which the graders could potentially disagree. But after completing the first passage, I realized I was not in the mood to tackle a highly specific piece with unfamiliar technical terminology. Are they going to call time while I’m noodling around Wikipedia trying to figure out the difference between various kinds of thingamajigs, I thought? So I went for the chatty piece and of course I drove home wondering whether the graders would disagree with my decisions. Too free? Not free enough? My husband took me out for a drink.
Finally, last Saturday a big envelope came from the ATA with my certificate and a letter of congratulations. I am now allowed to style myself “ATA certified from German into English.” In order to maintain the certificate, I have to earn a certain number of continuing education points every few years.
So what’s the point of being a certified translator? Obviously, certification by a professional body indicates to potential clients that you are not a charlatan.
And for some jobs, such as translation of birth/death/marriage certificates for official purposes, the organization requesting the documents will only accept the work of a certified translator. Years ago when I was emigrating to Canada I had to pay a certified German-English translator for an English version of my German police record even though I could have translated it myself. (NB: it was clean. I once got done for jaywalking in Munich but that wasn’t even on there.)
Another consideration is that as machine translation expands and work for human translators contracts, it might be increasingly advantageous to have special credentials.
So, although certification is not necessary for a good career in translation, it’s nice to have. And now I have it! I’m number 520122. Hooray.
Congratulations, #520122! Not quite Jean Valjean’s prison code, but it does have a certain ring to it.
What is an “unauthorized website”? Something like Google Translate?
Personally I would not have chosen a “chatty, informal magazine article” if I were doing a test like this. I had to translate some chatty, informal stuff as part of a large assignment last year, and it was absolute torture. I would have gone for the most formal thing they had. But hey, that’s just me.