ALTA NTP (Legal Specialty Certifications) common mistakes
ALTA NTP · Understand the traps and how to avoid them.
Resolving an ambiguous source structure by intuition instead of parsing it: attaching a modifier to the nearest noun, guessing which of two clauses a pronoun refers to, or ignoring agreement, case, or coordination markers that disambiguate the sentence.
Under exam time pressure, candidates read for gist and let the most familiar-looking reading win; source-language patterns that resemble the target language's default order feel correct even when the grammar points elsewhere.
What to do instead
Before translating a long sentence, bracket its clauses, mark head nouns, pronouns, and agreement endings, and state the grammatical relationship in plain words. Then test the alternative reading; if both survive the grammar, choose the one supported by the surrounding context and note why.
Shifting or dropping negation, modality, and hedging: turning 'may' into 'will', 'should' into 'must', 'not unlikely' into 'likely', or quietly deleting a double negative because the positive version reads more smoothly in the target.
Target-language fluency pressure pushes candidates toward confident, direct prose, and epistemic hedges feel like clutter, so they are trimmed during the polishing pass without the candidate noticing the change in meaning.
What to do instead
Keep a running list of every negation, modal, quantifier, and hedge in the source and tick each one off in the target during revision. Count negatives in both texts and confirm that each target sentence makes the same strength of claim as its source sentence.
Defaulting a polysemous or deceptive word to its most frequent sense: translating a false friend by its everyday meaning, or missing that a common word is functioning as a technical term, an idiom, or a grammatical connector with a different sense in this passage.
High-frequency equivalents are retrieved fastest, and candidates rarely re-read the collocational context that signals the less common sense, especially when the sentence still makes superficial sense with the wrong meaning.
What to do instead
For every item on a personal list of known false friends, plus every content word that looks suspiciously easy, check its immediate collocates and ask whether the chosen sense is compatible with the rest of the sentence. If a technical or idiomatic reading is possible, test it before committing.
Calquing source syntax: preserving source word order, clause chaining, absolute constructions, and pronoun density, producing target sentences that are grammatical but visibly foreign in their information order and rhythm.
Candidates translate sentence-by-sentence with the source text physically present, so the source's linear structure acts as a template; the target language's preferred ordering, verb placement, and topic-comment pattern never get a chance to assert themselves.
What to do instead
Complete a draft, then cover the source and read the target alone, rewriting any sentence that does not stand on its own. Practise restructuring by identifying the target language's preferred opening element and moving the main assertion accordingly, including splitting one source sentence into two when the target demands it.
Over-correcting toward fluency: adding explanatory connectives, merging short sentences, promoting implied subjects to explicit ones, and inserting clarifying phrases so the target reads better but carries claims and emphasis the source never made.
Candidates are trained to prize naturalness, and in the final monolingual read an added connector or a small explanatory clause is invisible because it improves the flow rather than breaking it.
What to do instead
After the fluency pass, do a strict source-target comparison in both directions, segment by segment, asking what each target clause is doing and whether a corresponding element exists in the source. Delete anything that cannot be traced back, and restore emphasis that was flattened by sentence merging.
Rendering a recurring key term in several different ways across one passage, so the same source concept appears as two or three target variants that a reader would take for distinct ideas.
Candidates translate linearly and make locally reasonable word choices without a record of earlier decisions, and fatigue makes the second and third renderings drift toward whatever collocates best in that sentence.
What to do instead
Do a quick first scan to extract recurring terms and fix one target equivalent for each before drafting. Then run a search for every variant used and normalise them, keeping a deliberate exception only where the source itself varies the term for rhetorical effect.
Flattening register: neutralizing dialect, slang, taboo, archaic, or ceremonial language into standard neutral prose, or conversely formalizing a casual source, so the target is uniformly correct but stylistically anonymous.
Neutral wording is always safe and always available, and candidates lack confidence in reproducing marked register, so they resolve stylistic difficulty by erasing the marker instead of substituting an equivalent one.
What to do instead
Profile the source's register markers first: contractions, honorifics, sentence length, lexical elevation, slang density. Choose a target register level explicitly, then check that marked passages stay marked in the target rather than collapsing into the same flat voice.
Ignoring established target-language formulations for the domain: translating fixed legal, medical, or institutional formulae and titles word for word instead of using the standard equivalent, and following source conventions for citations, units, or number formats.
Candidates translate content rather than genre, and without exposure to parallel texts in that domain they do not know that a stock phrase has a fixed target form that readers expect and that a literal rendering would flag as amateur.
What to do instead
Before translating a domain-specific text, review parallel documents of the same type in the target language and collect their stock phrases, abbreviations, and formatting habits. Apply those conventions even where the source does something different.
Transferring source typography into the target: keeping source-language quotation marks, spacing, dashes, ellipses, and comma habits, leaving full-width punctuation or non-target capitalization in place, and reproducing source-language title capitalization.
Punctuation is treated as transparent and is edited last, if at all; candidates working under time pressure focus on words and hand in a text whose punctuation silently signals a translation rather than an original.
What to do instead
Reserve the final minutes for a dedicated mechanics pass with a short checklist of target conventions for quotation marks, dashes, ellipses, spacing, capitalization, and numerals, and apply it mechanically to the whole text rather than reading for meaning.
Handling culture-specific references and document structure inconsistently: domesticating one proper noun and retaining another, converting some units or currencies but not others, and dropping headings, italics, footnote markers, or placeholders in the process.
Each culture-specific item is decided on the spot with no overarching policy, and structural elements are invisible during content-focused drafting, so omissions surface only if someone counts them afterwards.
What to do instead
Decide and write down an explicit policy for names, units, currencies, and realia before drafting, and apply it without exception. At the end, compare the source and target structurally item by item: headings, paragraph breaks, emphasis, notes, and every bracketed placeholder.