Examinations & Certificates
Each program finishes with a written exam, an oral exam and a certificate.
Examinations
Written exams are always based on the written material provided to the student — text book, course notes, emails.
Each oral exam is a bilingual conversation relevant to the program subject These exams are similar to the bilingual tutorials and are graded by our instructors.
Our Court Interpreting oral exam has two parts — consecutive and simultaneous. It is very similar to the national court interpreting exams conducted by by most of the professional societies of interpreters under the Canadian Translators Interpreters and Terminologists Council. Our exam design team was part of The Language Bureau (our parent company) and has designed, delivered and graded more court interpreting exams than everyone else in Canada combined: about two thousand over the past thirty years.
Certificates
We issue a Statement of Completion (SOC) for each course you finish and a Certificate for each program that you complete and pass the final exams.
SOCs are sent out by email and certificates by snail mail.
We can also email you an up-to-date transcript of your courses taken within a few days of your requesting it.
Certificated vs Certified
In British Columbia and several other provinces the terms “Certified Court Interpreter”, “Certified Community Interpreter”, “Certified Healthcare Interpreter” and “Certified Translator” are protected titles owned by the professional societies. That means you cannot call yourself by any of those terms unless you are a Certified Member of one of those societies.
In our opinion “Certified” suggests a guarantee and implies some level of liability on the certifying body. However, you may call yourself a “Certificated Interpreter”.
“Certificated” is a term commonly used in Canada and Britain to define someone who has been granted certificate in particular discipline by a training body of some sort.