ORAL EXAM PLANNER

Becoming a federal or a state certified court interpreter, is that only a dream or do you have a plan?

When your dream becomes a goal, you have what Napoleon Hill calls definiteness of purpose. What steps you take next, how you reach your goal, requires a plan and a strategy to schedule time to work on your plan.

Herein is a template to prepare for the federal or state oral exam. You may adapt it to your present circumstances. If you have a full time job or other commitments, you may want to practice one skill a day, Mondays through Fridays, as outlined here. On weekends you could practice all skills, always focusing on language issues and personal glossary building.

Included in this Oral Exam Planner are exercises for all skills. For Sight Translation sample exercises, first, do the 230-word English to Spanish under exam conditions. Next, check your work with the Deepl Translator draft to work on language issues. Deepl is not perfect. If you disagree with its version, check both your version and Deepl’s in English and Spanish dictionaries.

A longer English to Spanish fast sight translation is to be done as a preliminary simultaneous interpretation exercise. Time yourself. Solve language issues. Repeat until you can do it error free and faster than 120 words per minute.

The Spanish to English sight translation exercise is followed by a longer text to be used for shadowing in Spanish only. On your word processor there should be a “Read aloud” button to click. In mine, the text is read at approximately 150 words per minute.

For the simultaneous and consecutive interpretation sample recordings follow the instructions in the planner templates.