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 easy-to-fix issues, including Tip #16 (Cardinal Rules of Layout), #26 (Korean Font Differences), #31 (PowerPoint Tips), #29 (Spacing Issues in Word) and #32 (More Font Handling).

But line breaks are also a point of concern.

Suppose you've got this source text:

2015-12-17_9-55-44

And your Korean translation team delivers this fill-in-the-blank translation of it in Word:

2015-12-17_10-20-33

Don't lay it out into your design program like this:

2015-12-17_9-57-23

Or like this:

2015-12-17_10-00-52

Or even like this:

2015-12-17_10-03-30

These are not uncommon issues; they happen all the time, especially when Korean text is mixed with punctuation and English.

Korean Translation Tip, Part I – Hire us to do the most professional layout for you, or at least have us do an in-context proof of the text after you do the layout.

Korean Translation Tip, Part II – If you ignore the first half of this tip, be sure after layout to check all lines that start or end with punctuation and/or English to verify that the text matches the way the translation was delivered to you.

** BONUS – Do you see above that there are four fill-in-the-blank lines in both the source English and translated Korean? They aren't in the same sequence in the two languages! Want to know why? Check out this article and you'll understand: Tip #34 (Why You Can't Translate Phrase-by-Phrase Between English and Korean)

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