ALTA NTP (Title Insurance & Escrow Producer Credentials) common mistakes
ALTA NTP · Understand the traps and how to avoid them.
Leaving a pronoun, dropped subject, or elliptical clause unresolved, so the target sentence attributes an action, obligation, or opinion to the wrong party.
Candidates read sentence by sentence and translate the surface grammar, but many source languages (and English itself) allow zero anaphora or ambiguous 'it/they/this' that only the surrounding paragraph disambiguates.
What to do instead
Read the whole paragraph before drafting, mark every pronoun and elided subject with its antecedent, and keep a short referent list beside the draft; after translating, re-check each target pronoun against that list.
Shifting modality, negation, or quantifiers - turning 'may' into 'will', 'not necessarily' into 'not', 'few' into 'a few' - so the target claim is stronger, weaker, or the opposite of the source.
Smoother target phrasing pulls the translator toward confident, idiomatic statements, and small function words are the first thing the eye skips during drafting.
What to do instead
Run a dedicated post-draft audit that highlights every modal, negator, and quantifier in both texts and compares them one to one; restructure the sentence around the exact force rather than softening it.
Deleting a clause, merging two propositions, or inserting an explanatory phrase when a source sentence is dense or awkward, so information disappears or unstated information appears.
Time pressure plus the belief that a readable target text must be shorter leads candidates to 'fix' the source instead of translating it.
What to do instead
Translate every proposition, including ones that seem redundant; solve awkwardness by splitting or reordering target syntax, and if the source is genuinely ambiguous, keep the ambiguity rather than resolving it in the text.
Transposing digits, silently converting units, or reformatting dates and names when carrying numbers from source to target.
Numbers are treated as language-neutral and therefore not translated, so they get copied quickly and never re-read in the target.
What to do instead
Read every figure aloud in the target language during revision, verify the count of digits against the source, and reproduce units and formats exactly unless the client specification explicitly requests conversion.
Reproducing source-language syntax in the target: keeping source word order, overusing passive or impersonal constructions, and stringing long noun stacks that the target language would normally unpack.
Drafting under time pressure in the source's shadow is faster than composing natively, and the result still 'reads correctly' to someone checking it against the original.
What to do instead
Do a second pass reading only the target text for naturalness, rewriting sentences that mirror the source structure; keep the source visible only for a final accuracy cross-check.
Orthographic and typographic slips: missing diacritics, wrong capitalization of titles and headings, source-language quotation marks, dashes, or decimal and thousands separators carried over into the target.
Spellcheckers and CAT tools default to the analyst's keyboard locale, and punctuation conventions are rarely flagged as errors even when they are systematically wrong.
What to do instead
Set the target locale in every tool before starting, then run a dedicated mechanics pass checking accents, capitalization, quotation and dash style, number separators, and spacing rules for the target script.
Rendering a recurring key term three or four different ways across one text because each occurrence was translated in isolation.
There is no glossary at the start, and synonym variation feels like good style in the target language even when it breaks terminological equivalence.
What to do instead
Extract the term list before translating, decide one target rendering per concept (with documented alternatives), and run a search for each variant during revision to force consistency.
Selecting a dictionary's first-listed equivalent or a false friend rather than the term the target domain actually uses.
Bilingual dictionaries list senses in frequency order unrelated to the source's field, and candidates lack the domain reading needed to notice the mismatch.
What to do instead
Verify each candidate term in monolingual target-language texts from the same field, check its collocations, and confirm the choice with the client glossary or a subject-matter reader when the term is load-bearing.
Register mismatch: rendering institutional or legal prose in casual language, flattening honorifics and formal address forms, or turning an informal source into stilted literal prose.
Candidates default to their own idiolect and pay attention to clause meaning rather than to the social relationship and genre signals encoded in the source.
What to do instead
Identify register markers in the source first (address forms, honorifics, contractions, Latinate versus plain vocabulary), then pick an explicit target model text of the same genre and check the draft against it.
Translating conventional elements word for word - headings, boilerplate, citations, legal formulas, salutations - instead of using the target culture's established equivalent.
Attention goes to running clauses, and standard formulas look like ordinary text rather than genre-specific units with fixed counterparts.
What to do instead
Maintain a personal library of conventional equivalents per text type, apply it as a checklist before drafting, and follow the client style guide for citations, headings, and formulaic openings and closings.