Here are some suggestions for taking the federal oral exam and other exams like it. First of all, it is important to set aside a period of time (an hour or two) every day to practice your interpreting skills. It is impossible to cram for this type of exam, given that these skills need to be assimilated gradually and perfected over time. It is also a good idea to read as much as you can in both English and Spanish in a wide variety of fields. The texts that appear in ACEBO's Interpreter's Edge Turbo Supplement are representative of the types of materials used in interpreter exams, but it is impossible to predict exactly what subjects will come up in the exam you take. Therefore, you must be prepared for anything and everything.
On the day you take your exam, don't do any studying or practicing; the time for that is past. If you try to do some last-minute cramming and you come across a word you don't know or you stumble on a phrase, it will undermine your confidence, and self-assurance is one of your most potent weapons in an oral exam. At this point, the best thing for you to do is clear your mind and get ready to give a masterful performance.
Arrive early at the test site and park your car in a long-term parking lot so you won't have to worry about getting a ticket. On your way to the test site, you may want to shadow tapes to get your mind working on the right channels and warm up your tongue, or you can listen to inspiring music. Be aware, however, that you will not be allowed to take the tape player into the examination room. Whatever you do, don't listen to other candidates waiting to take their exams; fear is contagious.
When you go into the exam itself, you may want to bear in mind these additional tips for taking an oral exam:
One of the worst problems candidates for an oral exam face is fear of the unknown. If you know what to expect, you can be prepared for every aspect of the exam, and you will not be unhinged by unanticipated developments. Most interpreter certification exams are modeled after the Federal Court Interpreter Certification Exam (FCICE). Here's a step-by-step description of that exam.
The panel of raters who will evaluate you consists of three federally certified couirt interpreters. Several panels travel all over the country administering the exam; no examiner tests in an area where he or she works. Prior to administering the FCICE, the raters attend an intensive training session at which they are instructed in the proper methods of administering oral examinations. They practice giving and taking the exam several times, both to detect any ambiguities or other flaws and to reach agreement on acceptable terminology (thereby eliminating the possibility of regional differences in usage).
The FCICE lasts about 40 minutes (all portions of the exam are timed to ensure fairness) and has five parts:
When you enter the examining room, you will see the raters sitting at a conference table. They will introduce themselves and ask you to take a seat opposite them. They will begin recording the session, and will ask you to identify yourself for the tape.
The next step is to give you instructions on taking the exam. The evaluation process will be explained, and you will be informed of the standards to be applied (no adding or deleting, maintain the style and tone of the speaker, and so on). Then the actual exam will begin.
First the instructions for this portion of the exam will be read to you, and then you will be given the first text, a one-page, double-spaced document for translation from English to Spanish. It will be a report or affidavit containing a lot of colloquial language and some bureaucratic jargon. The purpose of this text is to determine whether you have a good command of colloquial usage in both languages, and to see if you are able to maintain the register, or language level, of the original in your interpreted version.
You will be allowed exactly five minutes (a timer will be set—don't be intimidated by it) to render the translation. First you will read through the text to be translated; if you have not begun your translation within two minutes, you will be told to begin. It is a good idea to practice sight translation with a timer so that you will know how long two minutes is and what you can accomplish in that period.
Remember to use your time wisely: Read for content the first time through, just to get an idea of what the document is all about. Don't think about how you're going to translate everything, or you'll get bogged down. After the first glance at the text to get an overview, look for important clues that will help you render a smooth translation, such as punctuation (parentheses, commas, colons), grammatical markers to identify referents and antecedents, linkage words (however, therefore, but), and search for common pitfalls. For example, English is characterized by long adjective-noun clusters; it is important to read ahead and find the noun in each cluster so that you can interpret that first in Spanish. After you have performed this brief text analysis, begin your sight translation. You'd be surprised at how many phrases will occur to you as you go along, now that you have a thorough understanding of the text.
If you haven't finished your sight translation in the allotted five minutes, you will be told to stop. That's why it's important to prepare the text completely before you begin, so you won't have to pause and read ahead, or backtrack and fix mistakes. Proceed through the text at a steady pace, but don't go so fast that you miss important clues or misread words. If you follow all these suggestions, you will have plenty of time to get through the text.
Next you will be given the text for sight translation from Spanish to English. This will be a one-page, double-spaced legal document (such as a contract, will, divorce decree, treaty, legislation, or code section). Follow the same procedures you did on the English text: Glance over the entire document to get an idea of what it's about, then go through it more carefully, looking for important clues. Spanish legal documents tend to have long sentences with lots of subordinate and embedded clauses. It is helpful to identify the subject and verb of each clause, and to trace all referents to their antecedents so you don't get lost in the text. Remember that you can break up long sentences when you translate into English; just make sure you retain the formal register of the original.
This portion of the exam, like the others, begins with explicit instructions that will be read to you by an examiner. Then you will be given a set of headphones, and one of the raters will start the tape for you to interpret. The tape will begin with some introductory matter to allow you to adjust the volume. Then a tone will sound, and after that you will begin interpreting from English to Spanish. The text will most likely be an opening or closing statement by an attorney. The register will vary from highly formal language to colloquial usage, and you will be expected to remain true to the style and tone of the source-language message in your interpretation.
The speed of this portion of the exam, 120 words per minute, is quite slow. (By contrast, the speed of lessons 1 and 2 in The Interpreter's Edge Turbo Supplement is about 140 words per minute. When you can interpret comfortably at that speed, you should have no problem with 120 words per minute.) You should not have any trouble keeping up with the speaker, and you will have plenty of time to analyze the message and come up with appropriate solutions in Spanish. Seven minutes is a long time, long enough to test your stamina, but also long enough for you to get a feel for the speaker and the subject matter. Even if you falter a little in the beginning, you will have time to recover and demonstrate your proficiency.
A rater will read you the instructions for this section, and then you will begin the consecutive portion. It will be a mock trial, in which an English-speaking attorney asks questions of two different Spanish-speaking witnesses; the examiners will read the parts from scripts. One witness will speak colloquial Spanish, the other a more formal language. In either case, the testimony will probably be quite detailed, with lots of names and numbers.
The raters will be looking to see if you are able to interpret all the details accurately while maintaining the register of the original.
The statements will be very long (three to six sentences, up to 60 words in length), and you will not be allowed to interrupt the speakers. Therefore, it is very important that you be able to take accurate notes. When you practice consecutive texts, experiment with different note-taking techniques (writing key words only, writing detailed notes with indentation to show the relationship of ideas, using symbols and arrows, and so on), but don't neglect your listening skills when you focus on note taking. It is easy for the inexperienced note taker to fall into the trap of scribbling all kinds of words on the paper and not paying any attention to the speaker. Then, when the time comes to read back the notes, the interpreter is faced with a jumble of disjointed words. Make sure you strike a balance between listening and note taking.
The longest utterances in the Turbo Supplement's Consecutive chapter are longer than those you will be expected to interpret in the FCICE.
On the exam, you will be allowed to ask for up to two repetitions. If you do ask for a repetition, the speaker will repeat the entire question or answer, not just the part you missed. You must interpret the entire repetition, even if you have interpreted part of the question or answer already.
The consecutive interpretation portion lasts 15 minutes. It is followed by another simultaneous interpretation section, this one only four minutes long. Again, a rater will read instructions to you before you begin interpreting. Then you will be given the headphones, and the rater will turn on the tape. This time, you will begin interpreting as soon as the tape begins. You will hear an attorney cross-examining first one witness and then another, and all questions and answers will be in English, to be interpreted into Spanish. As with the consecutive portion, one witness will speak at an informal level, and the other will be more formal.
This section of the exam is quite fast, 160 words per minute. Because it involves cross-examination, the speakers will alternate in rapid succession, and you will have to pay close attention to follow the exchange. They will most likely be dealing with technical subjects, (expert witness testimony on laboratory tests, for example), so it will be important to follow the logic of the speakers' arguments and not be intimidated by the subject matter or distracted by terminology. Remember that even though the topic they are discussing may be technical, there will only be a few technical terms; if you miss one or two of them, you will still pass the exam, but if you get flustered and stop interpreting, you will lose a lot of points. If you don't know a term, just leave it in the original English. No matter what happens, don't lose your momentum.
Simultaneous lessons 3 and 4 in The Interpreter's Edge Turbo Supplement are similar testimony read at between 157 and 192 words per minute. Once you are able to interpret this difficult material at such a fast pace, the FCICE should seem relatively easy.
The raters assess candidates in two different ways on the FCICE, the objective score and the subjective score. The objective score is a sum of all the points awarded for certain key words and phrases that are marked on the examiners' copies of the texts. If you interpret a marked item correctly, you get a point; if not, no point is given. The scoring items are evenly distributed among the different sections of the exam, so you have to do well on everything to pass. The criterion for deciding whether a term is correctly rendered is meaning: If the meaning is considered to be distorted in any way (including language level), the point is not given. But if the meaning is rendered correctly, though not elegantly, you will be given credit for that item.
The second assessment, the subjective score, is made at the end of each section of the exam. Candidates are rated on their delivery (pacing, coherence, composure) and adaptability or resourcefulness, on a scale of three: superior, acceptable, and unacceptable. At the end of the entire exam, the raters also assess the candidate's pronunciation and fluency. The subjective score and the evaluation of pronunciation and fluency only come into play if the candidate is borderline on the objective score. In other words, if you do very well on your objective assessment (80% or higher, out of a total of 220 points), the subjective score is irrelevant. Likewise, if you do very poorly, the subjective score will not put you over the top. But if you are hovering between passing and failing on your objective assessment, the subjective score can make or break you. That is why it is so important to pay attention to your delivery when you are interpreting.
Remember that an 80% passing score means that you can miss 20% of the scoring units and still pass the exam. Another way of looking at it is that you can afford to make an error every minute, and you will still not fail. This means you don't have to be perfect; so don't get flustered and lose your composure over a single error—just keep going. Keep your cool and convey the meaning as best you can.
On the other hand, you don't want to take any chances; you want to do as well as possible. That's why it's so important that you practice every day between now and when you take the test. If you keep pushing yourself to do better and tackle increasingly challenging material, you will be able to meet the exacting standards of an exam like the FCICE.
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