Category: Archives
Thoughts on Bringing the Kids Back to the US for High School
An American acquaintance in Taiwan recently asked me for my thoughts on whether to bring his daughter to the US for high school. The following is most of my response to him. When we returned to Korea in 2008, we only planned to stay for a couple years, and two...
Korean Translation Tip: Ornery Koreans Write Things Backward
In spite of the titles of this article, most Koreans are not ornery, nor do they do things backward. They just write differently than we do in English. Here are some examples. Fractions and page numbers Koreans don’t say “two-thirds” or “page two of three”; they say “of three, two”...
Answers to Questions about Accounting Services to Small Businesses in Korean
Setting up a small business in Korea isn’t hard, but understanding the bookkeeping and tax requirements can be tricky, especially as there isn’t a lot of Korean accounting information available in English. Sure, various web site resources cover the basics, but I’ve encountered plenty of situations where I still needed...
Korean Translation Tip: Handle Korean Line Breaks Like a Pro
With the robust multilingual support in Adobe Indesign and recent versions of other design packages, many clients are opting to handle Korean layout in-house. Unfortunately, people with absolutely no knowledge of Korean can really butcher a layout job. My Korean Translation Tips have addressed some of the most egregious mistakes and...
Issues in Calculating Rates for KO>EN Translation Jobs, Revisited
Several years ago I posted an article about why I don't generally offer per-word rates for Korean>English translation. The following is from a recent email to a client, explaining things in a bit more detail. ====== Dear <Client>, Here are the issues I can think of now which make...
Korean Translation Tip: Why You Can’t Translate Phrase-by-Phrase Between English and Korean
We frequently get translation requests for content where the source text has been chopped up into sentence fragments. This is especially common with captions for video, since the content needs to show up on-screen in bite-sized pieces. But sometime clients even send such requests because they want to be able...
