{"id":2942,"date":"2026-09-04T17:22:01","date_gmt":"2026-09-04T17:22:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/PLD\/?p=2942"},"modified":"2026-09-04T17:22:01","modified_gmt":"2026-09-04T17:22:01","slug":"the-quiet-work-of-a-credential","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/PLD\/2026\/09\/04\/the-quiet-work-of-a-credential\/","title":{"rendered":"The Quiet Work of a Credential"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Paula Ianelli<\/strong>
Revision: Eduardo Krauser<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

I became ATA-certified in 2012. I was 24, three years out of my translation degree, and at the very start of my career. I wasn’t short of training; my education had been excellent. But what I didn’t have was mileage, and mileage was the one thing my prospective clients knew how to look for.<\/span><\/p>\n

I quickly figured out that I had to find a way to make up for it not only to be noticed, but to be trusted. Someone commissioning a translation into a language they cannot read has no way to tell a trained professional from a bilingual acquaintance willing to charge less. They aren’t being careless. They are simply unequipped for the judgment we are asking them to make. A degree, however good, isn’t something a client can look up and verify in ten seconds. And its weight is legible mostly to people already inside the profession. Becoming ATA-certified converted my training into something the market could actually read.<\/span><\/p>\n

That is what made this kind of credential a springboard rather than a line on a CV. It worked in two directions at once. Against colleagues with fifteen or twenty years of road behind them, it put something in my column. I was never going to win a comparison of r\u00e9sum\u00e9s, but I could offer a credential many of them had never needed to pursue. Against the unqualified competition, it did the work I couldn’t do myself: it told a client with no basis for choosing that a basis existed.<\/span><\/p>\n

And this is the kind of qualification that gets picked up long before I even enter the conversation. This is how we are found now: through a search box, in a list, ranked against what feels like endless options. Certified translators are flagged as such in ATA’s Language Services Directory, and I have been contacted through it many times over the years. Look at it from the other side: someone scrolling that list has to start somewhere, and starting with the most obvious qualifications is entirely rational. That applies to agencies scouting new vendors and to colleagues deciding whom to refer work to, not only to direct clients.<\/span><\/p>\n

Getting certified also opened an entire market to me: academic transcripts, diplomas, birth and marriage certificates, the personal paperwork people need for visas, universities, and courts. This is work where the institution on the receiving end wants a translator whose credentials it can verify, and the certification seal answers that question right on the page. I had no way to compete for that work before.<\/span><\/p>\n

When I took the exam, I hauled a carry-on suitcase full of dictionaries to a venue in S\u00e3o Paulo, on the one day it was being offered there as an exception. I struggled to finish, my hands aching from writing page after page by hand, something I hadn’t done in years. Nothing about it is like that anymore. Today the exam is offered online on demand and in person, including at the ATA annual conference, and you take it on a computer. It is graded by certified translators working in your own language pair, against a shared framework for marking errors, which is precisely why the result carries weight with people who know this profession from the inside. And there is a practice test, built from a real exam passage and marked the way the exam is marked, so you can measure yourself before committing to anything.<\/span><\/p>\n

Whether you’re starting your career or you’ve been around for a while but feel a need to stand out from your competition, here’s the take-home message: getting certified is, as much as anything, about building your brand. Most often there is no clean line running from the seal to a signed contract. Perhaps I will never know which clients hired me because my certification seal was sitting there when they found me, doing quiet work I never witnessed. That is the nature of professional branding: you build it, and then it does its work in rooms you are not in.<\/span><\/p>\n

I have the mileage now, the years my 24-year-old self was missing. But fourteen years later, I would make the same call again.<\/span><\/p>\n

ABOUT THE AUTHOR<\/h2>\n

\"\"<\/i><\/p>\n

PAULA IANELLI<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Paula Ianelli was born and raised in S\u00e3o Paulo, Brazil, and has been a translator and conference interpreter for nearly 20 years. She is a member of AIIC, APIC, and TAALS, and is certified by both ATA and ABRATES. She has interpreted for celebrities like Sandra Bullock and Will Smith, as well as politicians such as U.S. President Donald Trump, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, French President Emmanuel Macron, and former Brazilian President Michel Temer. She has worked at events with thousands of listeners and live broadcasts to global audiences. She resides in New York, where she continues her work as a conference interpreter, both online and on-site. For more information about her work, visit <\/span><\/i>www.paulaianelli.com<\/span><\/i><\/a> or <\/span><\/i>www.pitraducao.com.br<\/span><\/i><\/a>.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Paula IanelliRevision: Eduardo Krauser I became ATA-certified in 2012. I was 24, three years out of my translation degree, and at the very start of my career. I wasn’t short of training; my education had been excellent. But what I didn’t have was mileage, and mileage was the one thing my prospective clients knew […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2947,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2942","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-uncategorized","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/PLD\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/ATA-Certified.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/PLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2942","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/PLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/PLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/PLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/PLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2942"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/PLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2942\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2951,"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/PLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2942\/revisions\/2951"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/PLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2947"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/PLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2942"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/PLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2942"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/PLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2942"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}