For those that don't know, MyGengo.com is a site that offers cheap human translations in a variety of languages. I'm thinking of taking the test to work for them in the near future, but since you can only take it 3 times I thought it would be worth finding out a bit about what to expect. I know a few people on this site have already passed it, so if any of you would describe it for me I'd be really grateful.

The things I particularly want to know are:

1)Is there a time limit?
2)Is the text selectable?
3)What format the test is in? (ie. multiple choice etc)
4)What kind of language is covered in the test? (For example, does it cover the whole range of formality, or is it all newspaper style ます stuff? Does it focus on functional language or are there descriptive passages like you might find in a work of fiction?)
5)If you know what level of Japanese is required you might as well say so.


Thanks for any help.

If you read the website it tells you most of that information.

There's a guide to the tests which says, among other things, that the test is split into a multiple choice pre-test and a ~300 word piece of translation. Neither test has a time limit.

They also provide a style guide and a detailed piece on the test expectations which has advice on how to pass and what common mistakes are, as well as how they mark it.

In the pre-test you can expect fairly complex, formal sentences which you might find in a quality newspaper. Spurred by your question, I took the test (I didn't even try to answer correctly). In my test test all the sentences were news-related; two were about economics, two about politics, and one about sport. For each question you had to pick between 5 fairly similar answers.

edit: since the only information you have to provide to sign up is an email address, you can easily try as many times as you want. You might as well sign up with a disposable address yourself to see what the questions are like.

Thanks Blahah. You have to be registered to see the stuff you linked to, which is why I didn't see it before. (Though I don't know why I didn't just register.)

I did as you suggested and signed up just to see the test... and I actually passed the pre-test! Really didn't expect that. XD

I got the questions right too - I signed up under another name and the questions had changed! Did you think there was some questions where two answers could have been right?

The first bit is five multiple choice translations of sentences. Usually most of the options are quite obviously poor translations, for example with confusing grammar, poor word choice or translating something far too literally. Sometimes there are two where it might be a bit more open to debate which one is better. You only need to get 4 out of 5 to qualify for the next basic level test, so even if you disagree over one question you should be able to pass if your Japanese and English are good enough.

You then have to do a roughly 300 word translation. There is no time limit on this, so if you think it's too hard you can just leave it and try again a few months later. Obviously, because they only have time to review a short translation for each person, they need to be quite strict on mistakes for this. I've heard of quite a few people complaining about failing this test when there was nothing wrong with their translation. However, if someone were to fail this test a couple of times then it might suggest that they are overestimating their language and writing abilities, or maybe just completely ignoring the style guide.