ITI Diploma in Translation exam — how hard is the unseen passage in practice?
I'm sitting the ITI Diploma in Translation exam in about 3 months and the unseen text component is what I'm most anxious about. My language pair is French to English and I'm reasonably confident in my specialist subject, which is legal translation, but working with an unknown text in a 3-hour window with no reference materials is a different kind of pressure from my normal work.
My daily translation work runs about 2,000 words at a comfortable pace so raw speed isn't the issue. The problem is that I can't look anything up during the exam. I've been doing 1 hour of timed practice daily for 6 weeks now, working with past legal texts and forcing myself not to consult any resources. My error rate is dropping but I'm still not where I want to be on producing natural idiomatic English under pressure.
For people who've passed — how strict are the examiners on register and idiom versus raw technical accuracy? I tend to produce safe, slightly formal English when I'm under time pressure rather than natural prose. Is that a pass-killer or more likely to come back as a style comment in feedback?
Register and idiom matter considerably more than I expected going in. I lost marks on my first attempt not because of mistranslations but because my English read like translated text rather than native legal writing. The examiners specifically flagged it in their written feedback.
I passed on the second attempt after focusing almost entirely on back-translation exercises — translating published English legal documents into French then comparing my English reconstruction with the original source. It forced me to internalize native legal register rather than producing literal equivalents of the French.
The examiners aren't looking for perfection, they're looking for professional competence. A safe formal register won't fail you by itself — it's when it tips into awkwardness or signals unfamiliarity with the target readership that marks drop. Push for natural but don't panic if it's not literary.
3 months at your current prep rate sounds about right. One thing that helped me was reading English case reports and contracts for 20 minutes daily without translating anything — just absorbing how legal English actually moves. After 6 weeks my output shifted noticeably toward more natural prose.