In a previous tip, we covered the fact that some Korean number units don't jive with English. The following tip points out that the way numbers are written also differs between the two languages.
In English, we generally spell out numbers through 100 and then use numerals after that. Here are a couple examples.
- Materials prepared by third-party agencies are copyrighted.
- Apnea occurs when you stop breathing in your sleep for ten seconds or more at a time.
However, this is how we might translate these into Korean.
- 제3자 기관에서 준비한 자료는 저작권의 보호를 받습니다.
- 수면무호흡증은 수면 중 한번에 10초 이상 호흡을 중단할 때 발생합니다.
This is not to say that Korean cannot be written out long form (it can!), or that English writers always follow this rule (they don't!). In fact, in technical English writing or for dates, dollar amounts, bullet points and plenty of other situations, numerals can be found in abundance in English prose.
But in general, you'll find that written Korean uses more numerals than English.
This causes trouble with quality assurance in the latest CAT tools (e.g. Trados Studio, memoQ) when setting things up to check for congruity of number units between source and target segments. Not only do the differences in Korean numbering units create confusion (see link in the first sentence of this article above) but the use of more numerals in Korean writing generates a lot of false-positives for potential errors and can be cumbersome to work through at the QA stage.
Korean Translation Tip: When checking for number congruity between a source English text and a target Korean translation, be ready for a lot of warning that don't mean anything. Or, if you just want to save time, set the QA checker to ignore these mismatches.
