Laurent - You are correct, these websites are owned by the exact same organization and team - which is a training and certification institute based in Oregon.
Samuel - You raise a great point about ID checking. While anyone could register and take a certification for someone else or get a fake ID, there are ways of checking ID of online examination professionals and we do our best to do so through IP tracking, secure login credentials, and registration data which does include names associated with their credit card and payment details.
We also appreciate your discussion of the open book examination process as you note below - you are right...this is obviously taken into consideration while the examination is written and it is made challenging enough that many people do not pass the examination.
As for controlling what resources are available to you when you write the exam, keep in mind that there are different types of examination styles. A closed-book exam tests knowledge in a different way than an open-book exam. In fact, open-book exams are often more suited for testing a candidate's skill if it does not require memorisation but the ability to analyse a situation and apply his knowledge (even if you look it up at the time). If the examiner knows that a candidate is likely to have Google access during the exam, he would simply need to take that into account when (a) designing the exam and (b) marking it.
I believe that starting a thread on exactly what translation professionals would like within a certification program such as our Certified Translation Professional (CTP) program is a great idea. To date, we have added features, benefits, and resources based on the direct feedback that we get from our participants.
For example, when the CTP designation began we only offered a study guide, career coaching, required readings, and email-based support for questions you may have while completing the program. After the first 100 professionals completed the program we heard from several participants however that video content and advice from additional expert translators would be helpful. As a result we have launched a multimedia training platform at http://TranslatorTraining.com. This platform provides participants with video training modules as well as MP3 audio recording with many translation experts.
We also upgraded our online examination software 4 months ago so we now have a count down timer available during the examination as well as secure SSL website use as well.
We are constantly looking for ways to improve the credibility and practical nature of the Certified Translation Professional (CTP) program. If anyone has additional feedback or tips on doing so they would be most welcome.
- Adriana
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Tomás Cano Binder, CT Spain Local time: 04:05 Member (2005) English to Spanish + ...
A critical point you seem to forget
Aug 31, 2010
CTP wrote:
We are constantly looking for ways to improve the credibility and practical nature of the Certified Translation Professional (CTP) program. If anyone has additional feedback or tips on doing so they would be most welcome.
Well, indeed this is the main matter: credibility. How can a private business claim to be minimally authoritative to create a "certification" scheme? Let me ask you the following:
1. Are you a government body regulating official translations in your country or in any country, and duly incorporated and regulated by law?
Or:
2. Are you an open organisation translation professionals can join?
3. Can translation professionals vote in your organisation's decisions and bylaws?
4. Can translation professionals elect who is to chair or manage your organisation, based on publicly available statements of intentions?
5. Do you have an established process of paper review which is publicly published and is traceable by any translation professional asking for it?
6. Do you always use publicly qualified and very experienced translators as the reviewers of the papers?
7. Do you have a remark or appeal procedure whose rules are publicly published?
8. Is your certification recognised by any public or private institution other than yourself?
These are the very minimum requirements any certification scheme can have. As far as I am aware, your organisation does not fulfill any of them.
In my opinion, you are in no position to claim that you issue a "certification", since "certifications", by definition, are issued by A) official, government bodies, or B) legally incorporated (as an association), regulated, open, officially recognised professional associations. As far as I can reasonably check, you are neither of these two.
I look forward to hearing from you about these matters.
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Yes, according to your minimum criteria we do qualify to run this certification program.
1. Yes we are duly incorporated and regulated by law.
2. Yes, we are an open translation organization that translators can join
3. Yes, translators actually lead and make up 100% of the executive and grading employees and contractors within the company.
4. We do not elect officials like a democratic country by casting industry-wide votes...we like many other private training companies decide who will lead the company best and put that person in charge of the program. This is not abnormal.
5. Yes.
6. Yes, we do select publicly qualified and very experienced translators as graders.
7. Yes, we do have appeal procedures and recently went through one for a candidate who did not agree with his grade. That has now been completely resolved and the candidate is satisfied with our appeal process.
8. Yes, our certification is recognized by many translation associations, networking groups, and many websites of professional translators including the TranslationDirectory International Association of Translators and Interpreters (IATI), TranslatorsTown.com, TranslationDirectory.com, an Arabic Translation Association, and dozens of other websites.
One thing we are doing along these lines is making sure our examination is completely psycho metrically sound after the recent shifts we have made to the examination we are ensuring that the test is sound from a statistical and psychometric point of view. This type of checking is critical to providing a industry wide certification program.
Your criteria listed here is different from ours, which is different from another organization's, which is completely different from what translators may benefit most from on a practical level. All of this leads to one truth - that the market is diverse and not one single certification program is going to serve everyone equally.
Some certifications are overly expensive, others require travel which is not practical for some translators, while still others are only offered in 5-10 languages out of the 100's of languages that should be covered for the entire industry.
The challenge on our part is that everyone's expectations and criteria differ so we try to do two things to grow our program over the long-term.
1. Meet as many of the diverse criteria requirements as we can and
2. Constantly add practical training tools and resources for translators that provide them with a ton of value regardless of the reputation of the actual certification program.
If you have a document, accreditation process, or white paper that you are referring to on your points within this last post I would be happy to review and there probably be 1-2 ideas we could put into practice that we haven't already....but everyone you talk to has a different list of what a certification program should or should not include.
- Adriana
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Tomás Cano Binder, CT Spain Local time: 04:05 Member (2005) English to Spanish + ...
Misleading statements
Aug 31, 2010
Adriana wrote:
1. Yes we are duly incorporated and regulated by law.
In my opinion you gave an intentionally misleading answer to my question, which was about whether you were a government body. You are clearly not. So a No in this case I reckon?
Adriana wrote:
2. Yes, we are an open translation organization that translators can join
This reply takes us to item 4. But it is a no. Correct me if I am wrong: translators may join your organisation either as clients or as employees, but not as equal members with a vote about the decisions of the organisation. Are you saying you are not a company or business? If you are a company or business, clearly you are not an association.
Adriana wrote:
3. Yes, translators actually lead and make up 100% of the executive and grading employees and contractors within the company.
This intentionally avoids the wording of my question. Le me repeat: "Can translation professionals vote in your organisation's decisions and bylaws?" Please respond.
Adriana wrote:
4. We do not elect officials like a democratic country by casting industry-wide votes...we like many other private training companies decide who will lead the company best and put that person in charge of the program. This is not abnormal.
So clearly you are not a professional association or organisation. You are a business, and as such you and maybe other people decide upon the company's matters. Translators joining your organisation have nothing to say about them. So it is a No to my question.
Adriana wrote:
5. Yes.
I cannot find a detailed description of the evaluation process in your website. Please provide a link!
Adriana wrote:
6. Yes, we do select publicly qualified and very experienced translators as graders.
OK. Let me ask you this: what is the pass rate of your certification exams?
Adriana wrote:
7. Yes, we do have appeal procedures and recently went through one for a candidate who did not agree with his grade. That has now been completely resolved and the candidate is satisfied with our appearl process.
I cannot find the appeal process described in your website. Please provide a link!
Adriana wrote:
8. Yes, our certification is recognized by many translation associations, networking groups, and many websites of professional translators including the TranslationDirectory International Association of Translators and Interpreters (IATI), TranslatorsTown.com, TranslationDirectory.com, an Arabic Translation Association, and dozens of other websites.
- International Association of Translators and Interpreters (IATI): You mean yourself? Isn't IATI one of the expressions of your own company?
- How do you explain that the only occurrence of "Certified Translation Professional" in TranslatorsTown.com is a link to your website?
Including a link to your website in a translator portal does not mean you are recognised by those companies. Also, my question was about public or private institutions, not other companies.
All in all, Adriana, let's face it: you are selling a course and a "certification" to people who A) have tried and cannot get certification via the several widely known and recognised schemes (which have very low pass rates as well as specific registration requirements) or higher education or B) are not aware that your certification has no official recognition whatsoever. Yes, it sounds lovely, but agencies know that this scheme means nothing unfortunately. I am somewhat sad for the people who are becoming certified under your scheme.
I insist: what is the pass rate of your exam?
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Tomas - you asked whether we were a government body or legally organized within our country to be in business. We are formed as a United States LLC and are legally operating here under their regulations. There is no intent to mislead or pretend that we are associated with a government body of any type.
The percentage of professionals who pass our examination is around 62%, higher than some programs pass rates and lower than others. Our goal is to offer a challenging and credible program.
We have never hidden the fact that we are a private organization and not a government body. The reason professional translators complete our program is because we offer valuable career coaching, video training modules, expert translator interviews, and other resources that have practical application and use. If government-ran programs were doing a great job at this already nobody would join our program but we have new members joining our program every week because that is not the case.
If you do not want to complete our certification program that is 100% fine with us - we are not trying to sell this program to everyone...as mentioned within our last post no single program is going to be right for everyone in the industry...and many translators may have no need for a professional certification program of any type.
You questions are now more argumentative than constructive or informational. We have answered your questions already and if you prefer another program over ours you are welcome to complete their program, but we are not going to get dragged down into arguments over your opinion of what you would like to see within a certification program offered by our team. We constantly add more resources to our program and will continue to offer the most credible, practical, and challenging program we can.
Best of luck within your own career.
- Adriana
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Tomás Cano Binder, CT Spain Local time: 04:05 Member (2005) English to Spanish + ...
To make things straight
Sep 1, 2010
CTP wrote:
Tomas - you asked whether we were a government body or legally organized within our country to be in business. We are formed as a United States LLC and are legally operating here under their regulations. There is no intent to mislead or pretend that we are associated with a government body of any type.
Just to make things straight, my question was:
Tomás wrote:
1. Are you a government body regulating official translations in your country or in any country, and duly incorporated and regulated by law?
My question contains "and", not "or". I never questioned that you are a a legally incorporated organisation. If you read my question more carefully, I asked whether you were a government body AND duly incorporated (as such, anyone would have read). Since you now clarify that you are a company and not a government body, the answer to my question is a No.
My apologies if you just misread my question or it was not clear enough.
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... from a legal standpoint I fail to see any difference between the CTP certification and a certificate I could create with any DTP application and print on some decorated diploma paper. Don't take me wrong, I'm not saying that CTP is an illegal business, I'm just questioning the use of getting such a certification.
I am a Certified Public Translator for EN-PT appointed by the Brazilian government. Brazil has laws that prevent any document in a foreign language from being accepted for official purposes, and that define who should translate them to render them acceptable. Some general explanation on how it works may be found here, if it matters. The point is that I have a fair idea on how it works when/where there is a law on this matter. Spain and Argentina have somewhat similar systems.
Now, in the USA there is no law on translations for official purposes. So any agency/office is free to set their own rules. In most cases, all that is required is to have someone formally declaring their fluent command of both source/target languages, taking full liability for the translation, the translation itself, and that person's notarized signature.
I'll refrain from delving into the whole variety of such rules I've seen so far in US agencies and institutions, by just naming a couple of them. Some offices will gladly accept translations by official transators in the country where the original document was issued. Others will require the translator to be ATA-certified. However most will accept a translation by any US-resident.
So what's the point in having the GTP-CTP certification, other than hanging the certificate on the wall? Who would be backing that certification?
It reminds me of the joke about a king visiting his the national asylum for the mentally insane. His Majesty asked one of the patients, dressed like Napoleon, "What leads you to think you are Napoleon?", to which the man replied sternly, "I don't think; I am Napoleon, because the Lord Almighty said so." Then, a booming voice rebutted from the other end of the room, "I never said anything of the sort! That man is crazy!".
This equates to a translator saying that s/he is a CTP because GTP said so, because there is no law in the USA defining a CTP and, as I understood, the certification would be issued in California.
To make this point clear, did the Wright Bros. or Alberto Santos Dumont have an aircraft pilot license? AFAIK they didn't, because there were obviously no laws anywhere on flying things just about to be invented.
Therefore, to certify a translator in the USA, first some law must be passed defining a certified translator, and who is legally enabled to certify anyone as such. Until that happens, there will be no point in certifying translators in the USA. Furthermore, this CTP certification wouldn't be valid in Brazil, Spain, Argentina, nor any other country having laws on this issue.
The ATA certification means an endorsement by peers, which is a fairly good indicator of someone's qualification. In case a translator 'goes bad or does badly', all ATA can do is to revoke that certification, yet this won't prevent the individual from continuing to do it without that certification where it is not required. In any country where there are laws on the matter, the government will revoke the certified translator's license, so their translations will no longer be valid for official purposes.
Summing it all up, this CTP certification seems to me about as good as to be a "certified banana peeler". Until there are laws governing who can - and who can't - peel a banana so that it may be eaten, there will be no difference between being certified or not. This doesn't mean that certifiying banana peelers is illegal; yet printing one's own certificate at home is a lot cheaper.
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neilmac Spain Local time: 04:05 Member (2007) Spanish to English + ...
Why bother with accreditation?
Aug 4, 2011
If you think you have what it takes to do the work, why don't you just set up as a freelancer?
There is a lot of demand for English-Chinese translation nowadays and I'm pretty sure you'd find work. It might be a struggle at first but could be worth it in the long run.
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Tomás Cano Binder, CT Spain Local time: 04:05 Member (2005) English to Spanish + ...
What kind of legal status
Sep 26, 2011
It was already declared here that the Global Translation Institute is a company, a LLC.
However, in their website they declare the following: "The Global Translation Institute (GTI) is fast growing international professional networking association".
Given that what the average person would understand "association" as a non-profit organisation classified as 501(c) under the United States Internal Revenue Code, one must wonder why this company claims to be an association. Well, they might well be a business association, in the sense that several professionals have incorporated the company as associates one to each other, but saying "association" is misleading, to say the least.
I wonder whether Adriana has anything to add to the discussion as to whether they are really an association in the same sense as the American Translators Association and very many other translator associations in the US, who clearly state that they are non-profit, 501(c) organisations.
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