ALTA NTP (Title Insurance & Escrow Producer Credentials) cheat sheet

Propositional core = agent + action + patient + time + modality + polarity; omission or inversion of any element is an accuracy error.

Ambiguity resolution order: syntax, immediate co-text, broader context, authorial intent; unresolved ambiguity is flagged for query.

Cohesion audit maps pronouns, ellipsis, substitution, and definite articles to antecedents before target drafting.

Negation scope: 'not all' is not 'none'; negative and quantifier scope must be preserved by target syntax, not source word order.

False friends are resolved by source-language sense in context, never by surface resemblance to a target word.

Implicit source information is not added unless genre and brief authorize clarification; added content counts as an addition error.

Numbers, dates, currencies, and units retain value and precision; conversion occurs only under a stated client or genre rule.

Accuracy pass compares source and target proposition by proposition for omission, addition, distortion, and logical reversal.

Target sentence architecture is rebuilt from clause function, not source word order; fixed target order overrides source emphasis patterns.

Agreement audit covers subject-verb, noun-adjective, pronoun-antecedent, and case; the target language determines which categories apply.

Every participial or adverbial modifier attaches to the sentence subject it logically describes; misattachment creates a dangling modifier.

Punctuation follows target conventions for commas, quotation marks, dashes, and spacing; source punctuation is not a template.

Diacritics and special characters are preserved exactly where target orthography requires them; omission can alter meaning or grammar.

Tense and aspect selection is driven by discourse function-completed, ongoing, habitual, prospective-not by one-to-one tense mapping.

Coordinated and compared elements share grammatical form; broken parallelism is a syntax error even when meaning is recoverable.

A target pronoun needs one clear antecedent; ambiguous reference is resolved by noun repetition or sentence restructuring.

Term consistency rule: one source concept maps to one approved target term per project; documented variants are exceptions.

Concept-first lookup order: define the concept, identify the domain, check the glossary, then choose a target term; string matching is last.

Terminology authority order: client glossary > domain standard > parallel corpora > general dictionary; conflicts are flagged.

Collocation check tests the chosen term with target verbs, nouns, and prepositions; a correct concept in an unnatural phrase is a terminology error.

Polysemy rule: domain and co-text select the sense; the most frequent general meaning is not the default in specialized text.

Acronyms are expanded at first use when the target audience needs it; established standard acronyms remain unchanged.

Proper names follow client convention and established equivalents; legal entity names are not translated without authorization.

Neologism rule: absent an approved term, use a descriptive target term and, if brief permits, source term in parentheses at first occurrence.

Register = formality + technicality + politeness + social distance; target wording matches the source audience relationship.

Genre convention determines target structure; legal, medical, academic, and promotional texts have different expected patterns.

Calque test: if target structure violates idiom, collocation, or natural rhythm, the literal rendering is rejected.

Voice changes preserve emphasis and agency; passive-to-active conversion requires a recoverable agent and target genre support.

Figurative language is rendered by function or effect; the literal image survives only when target readers share the association.

Honorifics and titles preserve relative social rank and familiarity; target conventions encode the relationship without upgrade or downgrade.

Style guide rules for capitalization, headings, numbers, and dates override personal preference and apply consistently.

Two-pass edit sequence: target-only read for naturalness and mechanics, then source-target comparison for accuracy and terminology.