I'm sitting for the CTP in about 7 weeks and the translation quality assessment section has me more nervous than the practical translation tasks. My working languages are English and Spanish and I've been doing freelance legal translation for about 4 years, but the systematic evaluation frameworks they test on feel more academic than anything I use day-to-day.
From my practice tests I'm running around 71-75% overall, but specifically on quality assessment scenarios I'm dropping to about 62%. The gap is big enough to swing my pass/fail, especially since I need a 75% overall to pass. I've been spending about 2 hours a day on exam prep for the last 3 weeks.
The MQM and ASTM F2575 framework material keeps tripping me up because there are so many overlapping error typologies. Does anyone have a way of organizing that material that actually sticks? I've made flashcards but they feel disconnected from how the exam actually applies the concepts in context.
I had almost the exact same profile — strong on practical translation, weak on evaluation frameworks. I spent my last 2 weeks almost entirely on quality assessment scenarios and brought that section from 63% to 79% on the actual exam. The key insight for me was that MQM is hierarchical — fluency-level errors vs. accuracy-level errors have different weights, and the exam tests whether you understand those distinctions contextually.
7 weeks at 2 hours a day is 98 hours, which is plenty. Just redirect more of that toward your weak section now rather than at the end. You're already at 71-75% overall, so you're not starting from zero — you just need to close that quality assessment gap specifically.
The quality assessment section is probably the most academic part of the whole exam. What helped me was taking a real translation, intentionally introducing different error types, and then categorizing them using MQM. Doing it yourself rather than reading examples made the error typologies way more memorable.
ASTM F2575 is worth reading in full at least once, not just through summaries. The exam pulls from specific sections about reviewer qualifications and process requirements that summaries tend to skip. About 6-8 questions on my sitting directly referenced process steps.
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