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This tip is about three Korean punctuation marks you won’t see in our translations. (For past tips on other Korean punctuation, see #3, #14, #19, #33.) 1. Half-brackets: 「 」 (Hexadecimal codes: 300C and 300D)Korean doesn’t have capital letters (see tip #24), and so Korean writers use other techniques to...
Today's tip comes straight out of three recent projects I worked on and shows that a Korean translation into English (or vice-versa) could mean translating a "1" as a "3" or a "9" as a "1"… Here's why… 1. Call 911!…. I mean, call 119! If you call 911 in...
I’m occasionally asked if Korean has an alphabetical order. Yes, it does! There are officially 24 letters in the Korean alphabet, but here are the 14 used to separate a printed Korean dictionary into sections. ㄱ ㄴ ㄷ ㄹ ㅁ ㅂ ㅅ ㅇ ㅈ ㅊ ㅋ ㅌ ㅍ ㅎ The...
There are two styles of technical Korean writing and these are primarily expressed in sentence endings. In terms of the language as a whole, this is a simplification, since there are any number of local dialects that complicate things, written endings that can also be used in spoken language to...
We were in San Antonio recently dropping Treasure off at university and while we were there, we met a friend of Myunghee's. After dinner, Myunghee's friend posted this photo on Facebook. An old friend of Myunghee's in Korea saw the photo and added the following comment in Korean. The comment...
Around 60-70% of the Korean vocabulary is derived from Chinese. Long ago, Korean was even written using only the Chinese script. However, the Korean writing system (called “hangul” in Korean) has become the standard in today’s world, even though Chinese characters (called “hanja” in Korean) still make frequent appearances in...
It’s been several months since my last Korean translation tip because, well, I’ve been busy translating… and have also spent this time working hard to improve my skills and credentials. I’m proud to say that this effort has resulted in an upgraded resume. Ta-da! – You can download it here. [EXPIRED LINK REMOVED: /files/160707_Resume_Steven_S_Bammel_Certified_Korean-to-English_Translator_Intl_Commerce_and_Finance.pdf] I’m...
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”...
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...
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...
