ALTA Competency Exam (CALT) cheat sheet

Cohesion is surface-level linking (reference, ellipsis, substitution, conjunction, lexical reiteration); coherence is the underlying logical continuity a reader reconstructs.

Grice's maxims are quantity, quality, relation, and manner; flouting a maxim generates a conversational implicature rather than literal meaning.

Speech act analysis separates locution (what is said), illocution (the act performed, e.g. warning), and perlocution (the effect produced); performatives are not truth-evaluable.

Anaphora resolution rule: a pronoun takes the nearest compatible antecedent unless gender, number, or semantic plausibility rules that candidate out.

Presupposition triggers include definite descriptions, factive verbs (know, regret), change-of-state verbs (stop, begin), and clefts; presuppositions survive negation and questioning.

Source-text analysis order: extratextual factors (sender, audience, medium, purpose) before intratextual factors (genre, register, syntax, lexis).

Metaphor detection test: a literal reading that produces semantic anomaly signals a cross-domain mapping, which must be identified before transfer.

Ambiguity types are lexical (polysemy), structural (attachment/scope), and referential; structural ambiguity is resolved by constituent and substitution tests.

Genre conventions constrain explicitation: legal and technical texts tolerate little ellipsis, while literary texts may carry deliberate ambiguity intact.

Vinay and Darbelnet's seven procedures: borrowing, calque, literal translation (direct); transposition, modulation, equivalence, adaptation (oblique).

Explicitation adds only what is recoverable from source context or required by target grammar; adding information absent from the source is an addition error.

Omission is defensible only when the element is redundant and recoverable from the surrounding text; dropping propositional content is an accuracy error.

Transposition changes grammatical category without changing meaning; modulation changes point of view (negated opposite, cause for effect, part for whole).

Compensation relocates a source effect (pun, dialect, rhyme, register) to a different target position when the original slot cannot carry it.

Accuracy error taxonomy: mistranslation, omission, addition, false cognate, unresolved ambiguity, wrong term, and wrong tenor.

Skopos rule: the translation brief defines what fidelity means for a given job, and adequacy to purpose outranks literal correspondence.

Cognate rule: no cognate meaning is transferred without verification in a monolingual target-language dictionary.

Back-translation check: a blind back-translation that matches the source semantically supports adequate transfer; divergence flags a candidate error for review.

Given–new ordering places familiar information early in the clause and new or focused information late, aligning with end-focus and end-weight.

Deverbalization reduces source wording to a semantic kernel before re-expression, which removes calqued syntax and source-language surface structure.

Translationese markers: overused passive, abnormal collocations, retained pronouns, over-literal connectors, and uniform sentence length.

Parallelism rule: items in a series share grammatical form; lists mixing nouns, verbs, and clauses must be recast to a single pattern.

End-weight rule: heavy constituents move right; a subject clause exceeding roughly three lines is a candidate for extraposition or sentence split.

Topic-prominent source languages may require inserted subjects in subject-prominent targets, because topic-comment order is not grammatical there.

Sentence-splitting criterion: split when a target sentence carries more than one main assertion or exceeds the sentence-length norms of the target genre.

Punctuation is language-specific: serial commas, quotation marks, and spacing before colons or semicolons differ across target languages.

Paragraph check: each paragraph carries one topic sentence and consistent thematic progression from given to new.

Register is the configuration of field (subject matter), tenor (participant relation), and mode (channel); a shift in any one dimension forces lexical and syntactic adjustment.

Term preference hierarchy: client glossary, then domain standard, then authoritative dictionary, then corpus evidence, then a documented coinage.

Culture-specific items are handled by retention, calque, gloss, substitution, or omission; the choice is driven by the item's function and the brief.

T/V systems (tu/vous, du/Sie) encode solidarity versus power; the target's own address system is selected rather than literally translating the pronoun.

Term consistency rule: one concept maps to one target term per document unless the brief specifies variation.

Register-mismatch checklist: slang rendered as formal prose, technical terms rendered colloquially, and honorifics or politeness markers dropped.

Localization variables: date order, decimal and thousands separators, currency, units of measure, address format, and personal-name order.

Taboo and euphemism are matched by strength, not by literal referent: a mild source euphemism takes a mild target euphemism.

Tense and aspect are distinct: aspect encodes viewpoint on an event (perfective completion versus imperfective ongoingness) and must be mapped to the target's aspectual system.

Definite article marks identifiable referents (anaphoric, unique, superlative); English uses zero article with generic plurals and abstract nouns.

Case and preposition government are set by the verb or preposition; recheck government after any transposition changes the governing element.

Agreement scope (gender, number, person) must be rechecked after any change in word order or substitution of a noun.

Spelling-variant consistency: en-US versus en-GB forms (organize/organise, color/colour) must be uniform within one document.

Quotation conventions differ: English “ ”, French « » with non-breaking spaces, German „ “, Spanish « » or “ ”; one system per document.

Number and unit mechanics: SI spacing (10 kg), decimal comma versus point, and thousands separators follow the target locale.

Title and heading capitalization differs by language: English headline caps versus sentence case in French, Spanish, and Italian.

Diacritics are meaning-bearing: si/sí, el/él, papa/papá, and German umlauts distinguish words and grammatical categories.

Competence boundary rule: accept work only within one's language combinations, subject domains, and capacity, and disclose the limits to the client.

Confidentiality covers source texts and client data; disclosure requires client consent or legal compulsion.

Accuracy obligation: substantive content is not altered, omitted, or added, even at client request, without recording the change.

Conflict of interest (e.g. translating for a litigant in one's own case) requires declining the assignment or disclosing the conflict.

Error-correction duty: an error identified in delivered work is disclosed and corrected at no additional cost.

Revision compares target against source for meaning, terminology, and register; proofreading checks only surface mechanics.

Machine-translation use requires human post-editing to full quality, with disclosure governed by the client contract.

Certified or sworn translation attests fidelity to the source document, not the truth or legal validity of its content.

Refusal grounds: content requiring falsification or promoting illegal acts; the client is referred elsewhere.