Learning by Translating

(no, I’m not going to write a blog post about the Black Eyed Peas song with the same title!)

FSTI stands for “From Student To Interpreter”, a new blog category I’ve just created!

My preparation for the entrance exam has officially begun!

I only hope that four months are enough (the exam is going to be in September).

I downloaded past exam audio files to do some practice. The exam consists of two cloze tests per language and one reformulation exercise for each language. The cloze tests are different from the ones I am used to, because in the former the text is purely oral (I suppose), and in the latter it is written. At the entrance exam you have to fill in a grid with the missing words (you have to insert a word for each beep you hear in the audio file). The “Video Vocab” videos on Business English Pod have a similar exercise, in which there is a part in which  words related to a certain topic, their definitions and examples containing them are shown, and then an exercise in which you have to insert the missing word, that is structured almost in the same way as the entrance exam one (I wrote “almost” because you can read the sentence, instead of just hearing it).

Does anyone know any websites where I can find similar exercises? I would like to do practice on as many subjects as possible, since you can’t know on which subjects you must get ready for the exam. Thanks in advance!

Yesterday I came across an interesting acronym that can be referred, in my opinion, to both studying and interpreting: Preparation Prevents Poor Performances.