CATTI Level 3 cheat sheet

CATTI Level 3 笔译 has two subjects: 笔译综合能力 (comprehensive ability, objective items on vocabulary, grammar, reading, and error correction) and 笔译实务 (translation practice). 实务 is the deciding subject; a score below 60 in either subject fails the level.

笔译实务 Level 3 timing: 180 minutes total. English-to-Chinese and Chinese-to-English passages are both required; allocate roughly half the time to each and reserve 15-20 minutes for review.

Level 3 实务 scoring is holistic per passage: accuracy of meaning transfer, completeness (no omissions or additions), target-language fluency, and register. Mistranslating a key term costs more than a stylistic imperfection.

Decision rule for unknown terms: if the term is a proper noun or institutional name, keep the source form in the target text (or transliterate plus gloss) rather than inventing an equivalent; if it is a common noun, translate by context and never leave it in the source language.

Chinese-to-English structural rule: Chinese clauses chained by 意合 (parataxis) must be recast into English 形合 (hypotaxis) with explicit connectors, relative clauses, or non-finite structures; do not mirror the Chinese comma chain word-for-word.

English-to-Chinese rule: long English noun phrases and passive constructions usually become Chinese verb phrases and active or topic-comment structures; keep 的-stacking to at most two modifiers before a noun.

Numbers, dates, and units must be converted and double-checked: 亿 = 100 million, 万 = 10,000, 万亿 = trillion; dates follow target-language convention (Chinese year-month-day; English month-day-year in US style).

Terminology consistency rule: fix one rendering per recurring term before drafting and apply it throughout; CATTI deducts for a term translated two different ways in the same passage.

Register rule: official documents, speeches, and news commentary take formal written style; do not introduce colloquialisms, slang, or first-person commentary absent from the source.

CATTI Level 3 口译 has 口译综合能力 (listening comprehension, summary, and gap-filling in the target language) and 口译实务 (consecutive interpreting). Both must reach 60 to pass.

Level 3 实务 format: consecutive interpreting of English and Chinese passages with note-taking; segments are typically 1-2 minutes, and the interpreter speaks after the speaker pauses.

Note-taking rule: notes record meaning and structure (subject-verb-object skeletons, arrows for direction, symbols for causation and contrast), not verbatim words; source-language wording in notes invites literal, broken output.

Delivery rule: begin within 2-3 seconds of the speaker's pause, keep a steady pace, and finish the segment without restarting; filled pauses and self-correction are penalized more than a slightly simplified rendering.

Fidelity rule: preserve numbers, names, titles, negation, and modality (must/should/may). A dropped negation or a wrong number is a critical error; omitting a decorative adjective is minor.

Handling unknown words: paraphrase by category or function in the target language and continue; stopping to search for a term breaks fluency and loses more points than the paraphrase.

Active listening rule: identify the discourse marker (however, therefore, in addition, for example) first, since it determines the logical relation the target sentence must carry.

Memory rule: chunk source speech into sense groups of 5-9 words; retain the last sense group verbatim while noting earlier ones, because short-term memory decay is steepest for the most recent content.

Numbers rule: write digits in notes, convert units on the fly (万/亿 to thousand/million/billion), and read the number back in the target language before continuing the sentence.