Eligibility Requirements for ATA’s Certification Exam: Where Did They Come From and Where Did They Go?
By Geoff Koby
Today, all individual ATA members are eligible to take ATA’s certification exam in any of the available language pairs. That is, the only “eligibility requirement” is ATA membership. Those who pass must also continue to be ATA members in good standing to remain certified. Even more broadly, the recommended practice test (one retired passage from the exam) is available to anyone in the world, without a membership requirement. But it hasn’t always been that way.
Back in the 1990s, when certification was still called “accreditation,” individuals had to be members of ATA for at least four weeks to take the exam, all candidates were required to take a practice test in the same language combination to sit for the exam, and the exam had to be taken within two years after receiving the results of the practice test. The practice test requirement was waived, though, if the candidate had participated in a workshop or had already taken an accreditation exam (regardless of the language combination). Also, the exam at that time had to be handwritten and consisted of five passages: general, medical/scientific, semi-technical, legal/business, and literary.
In 2000, ATA’s Board arranged for Michael Hamm, an accreditation expert, to conduct a review of ATA’s Accreditation Program. An executive summary of his review published in the September 2000 ATA Chronicle recommended several changes, including “Changing the name of the process to ‘certification’” and the “Establishment of translation-related eligibility requirements.”1
In June 2001, ATA’s Board responded by deciding, among other things, to change the name of the credential from “accreditation” to “certification,” to establish “pre-qualifying requirements” for taking the exam, as well as continuing education/professional development requirements. The eligibility requirements were introduced for the certification exam in 2003. Under the new system, candidates had to already hold certification from a member organization of the International Federation of Translators (FIT); have an approved degree/certificate in translation or interpreting; have a non-translation/interpreting degree plus translation experience; or, finally, have an advanced degree in any field. They were also required to comply with an ethics requirement.
The intent of these new eligibility requirements was twofold—first, to provide guidance to candidates for appropriate preparation so they would be ready to take the exam, and second, to enhance the credibility of the credential. It was hoped this would also increase the pass rate by reducing the number of candidates who failed because they lacked the necessary skills.
However, while exam volume decreased by almost 50% in the first year, the overall pass rate only increased slightly. This showed that although the eligibility requirements addressed preparation, they were not good predictors of translation skill as shown by success on the certification exam.
In 2013, the Certification Committee asked ATA’s Board to remove the “advanced degree in any field” eligibility requirement, since holding an advanced degree in, say, physics or history is not a predictor of translation skill in any way, and to replace it with eligibility by providing language proficiency test scores from the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL). These changes were intended to make the eligibility requirements match qualified candidates. However, the ACTFL test is a measure of language proficiency, not translation proficiency, and the data showed that even candidates with high language proficiency were regularly not passing the certification exam.
Because the eligibility requirements had reduced the number of examinees without reducing the number of unqualified candidates, they proved to be of little value in predicting success on the exam, so the Certification Committee and ATA’s Board decided to remove all eligibility requirements (except ATA membership), effective January 2017.2 Thus, access to the certification exam is more open to the membership now than it was in the 1990s, when a practice test was required.
The Certification Committee does, however, very strongly recommend that all candidates take a practice test because of the benefits. First, it’s authentic—the practice test is one actual passage from a recently retired certification exam, so it represents actual practice and follows the same criteria as the actual exam. Second, taking the practice test allows members to see the typical length, difficulty level, and translation challenges that are included in every exam passage, which will make taking the actual exam less intimidating. Third, taking a practice test is much cheaper than taking the certification exam. Given the 20% pass rate on the exam, it’s financially wiser to take the practice test and only move forward with the certification exam if the results are strong. Fourth, the practice exam is graded by a current ATA grader in that language pair using the same grading criteria and tools as an actual exam, so the result can be a guide to future performance on the exam. Fifth, feedback is provided (which is not available on the certification exam)—not just the error points and categories, but also brief explanations of the error markings that can help candidates see where their weaknesses lie.
For all of these reasons, the Certification Committee urges all members who are thinking of taking the certification exam to purchase a practice test (online), to take it under exam conditions using only the permitted resources, to return it promptly, and to wait for the feedback before deciding to move on to the exam.
Notes
- Hamm, Michael S. “An Executive Summary: Review of the ATA Accreditation Program,” The ATA Chronicle (American Translators Association, September 2000), 13.
- Nevertheless, a 2020 short summary of the Hamm report by Lenora G. Knapp, appeared in The ATA Chronicle, July/August 2020, pages 12–13, still stated that: “Eligibility requirements are as critical to the credentialing process as the examination itself.”
Geoff Koby, CT, is a past president of ATA. He is an ATA-certified German-to-English and Dutch-to-English translator specializing in business, legal, financial translation, and patent translation and litigation. He is also a professor of translation studies in Kent State University’s comprehensive translator training program. He is a grader for ATA’s German-to-English certification exam and serves on ATA’s Certification Committee. He is a board member of the American Foundation for Translation and Interpretation, ATA’s nonprofit educational and scientific foundation. geoff@kobytranslation.com
