![]() Typical examples of English-language texts at the appropriate level are editorials in national newspapers, or articles in magazines aimed at an educated audience. Texts that present straightforward factual material are generally too easy, while highly specialized, esoteric, or stylistically idiosyncratic pieces are considered unduly difficult for candidates under exam conditions. In more concrete terms, the passage should present a clear and coherent progression of thought and reasoning in which the candidate must follow an argument or supported opinion and possibly author inference. government’s Interagency Language Roundtable in its scale for reading proficiency. Reading Level: The source text’s sentence structure and higher-level organization should correspond to Level 3 as described by the U.S. Thus, any specific terminology should be commonly known or readily accessible in a good general dictionary. Lexicon: The vocabulary should be nontechnical (i.e., require no particular knowledge of a specialized field). Topics that are controversial or potentially upsetting to a candidate are avoided. The length of source texts in other languages is judged by the average length of a translation into English.Ĭontent: The subject matter should be readily familiar to an educated layperson. ![]() Length: Source texts in English must be between 225 and 275 words. Here are some key guidelines that all graders abide by when selecting passages: The first step in selecting a passage is to find a text in the source language that meets explicit criteria for passage suitability. In selecting and developing passages, graders look for texts that feature the challenges identified in the LSGs. For example, a given language may have many “false friends” (i.e., words in a foreign language bearing a deceptive resemblance to words in one’s own language), or perhaps terms that can be translated in different ways depending on context. For example, an LSG could state that a source language tends to have long, complex sentences that need to be split into two or more shorter sentences in translation. Retired passages may then be repurposed as practice tests.Įach grader workgroup is also required to develop language-specific guidelines (LSGs), consisting of common challenges for translators in their language pair and direction. After a certain time, active passages are retired and any unused backup passages are put into use. This bank consists of three active passages that are presented to candidates (who select two of the three to translate) and three backup passages that come into play if any of the active ones are spoiled due to a breach of passage security or another cause. The Certification Program’s policy is that each grader workgroup (the set of graders responsible for a given language pair to or from English-e.g., Arabic>English, English>Arabic, etc.) must maintain a bank of six passages per exam year. Passage Bank and Language-Specific Guidelines The following will walk you through the multi-stage process of selecting, vetting, submitting, and approving an exam passage. ![]() If a group of graders needs a new passage, don’t they just find a random article in an online newspaper, copy and paste a few paragraphs onto a blank page, and add it to the exam packet? Well, there’s a bit more to it than that. Ask an ATA certification exam grader to name the most difficult thing about the job, and chances are they’ll reply, “passage selection.” You might wonder what’s so hard about this task.
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