Budget Korean-to-English Document Translation

Get affordable, high-quality Korean-to-English document translation.

Stuck between the high cost of best-practice human translation and the low-quality of online translation mills and Korean PEMT? Save on translation of Korean documents that doesn’t require the “white glove” treatment of my premium Korean-to-English document translation service.

I will help you to:

  • Sell products in Korea
  • Meet regulatory requirements in Korea
  • Communicate with contacts in Korea
  • Get market information about Korea
  • Achieve other goals requiring Korean-to-English translation support

You can expect from me:

  • Affordable, well-formatted Korean-to-English translations that are easy to understand
  • On-time delivery every time, sometimes with overnight turnaround
  • Prompt and thorough communication before, during, and after your project
  • Consistently good quality from project to project by leveraging technology and best-practice workflows
  • Transparent pricing structure that may reduce your costs over time
  • Accountability through workflow verifiability, US-based business registration, professional liability insurance, and my “Consistently Good Work” Pledge
  • Confidential handling of and respect for your intellectual property
  • That I will personally translate your Korean documents to English and will not outsource the work!

Approximate rate range: US$0.10–0.12/Korean character
Visit Rates & Pricing for further details, including discount options.

“The service was efficient, professional and on time. It met my translation needs.”

Brett Miller (Seoul, Korea)

The problem with cheap machine translation

If you’ve used Google Translate or another online translation tool, you’ve likely been amazed. Today’s machine translation services are tremendously useful for translating between languages. The latest technology is based on advanced artificial intelligence algorithms. These deliver fluent Korean translations that are adequate for many purposes, both personal and business.

However, you’ve probably also noticed a fair share of nonsense in Korean machine translation (MT) output. Machine translation errors come in two types. The first kind of error relates to translations that don’t make sense, are grammatically incorrect, or are otherwise clearly wrong or vague. This type of translation failure is annoying and may make certain machine translation output unusable, or at least less useful. If you know that something’s wrong with the translation, you can ignore it, get the work done by a professional translator, or even just send it through a different machine translation program and hope for a better result.

However, what if you don’t know which parts of a translation are wrong and which parts are right? Grossly incorrect machine translations may read naturally and appear correct and complete if you don’t know the source language. But basing business decisions on mistranslations could have serious financial implications as well. Thus, not knowing which parts of a machine translation are correct undermines trust in the entire machine-translated document. This distrust, in turn, reduces the usefulness of the entire translation, even the parts that are right!

The solution is a hybrid translation approach

What if you could get the benefits of low-cost machine translation without the risk of serious errors? Being able to trust the entire translated document would eliminate guesswork and dramatically raise the value of the translation to your purposes. This is precisely the outcome my affordable Korean-to-English document translation service delivers. I pair machine translation with my professional translation skills to help you cut costs and eliminate concerns about hidden translation errors.

In the translation industry, post-edited machine translation (PEMT) is the common term for a rudimentary approach to improving machine translation output using human editors. Post-edited machine translation workflows are supposed to include careful editing to correct mistranslations, as well as improve style. However, the emphasis with PEMT is often on MT engine training, rather than the fidelity of the human editing process. Thus, the low rates many Korean translation providers offer for Korean PEMT and other human-assisted Korean machine translation tasks virtually guarantee sloppiness by editors, who may or may not actually check for both kinds of translation errors discussed above.

My best-practice hybrid Korean document translation service is a significant improvement over traditional Korean PEMT and other human-assisted Korean machine translation approaches. Rather than building a specialized MT engine or merely “editing up” a machine translation, my service focuses on my professional responsibility as a translator to refer to one or more machine translation outputs and produce a correct and acceptable human-directed final translation.

My hybrid Korean document translation approach is for clients who need to know what a Korean document says but don’t have the budget for the holistic translation approach I provide with my premium Korean-to-English document translation approach. This affordable approach lets you avoid working with cheap translation mills whose output may be virtually indistinguishable from Korean PEMT and other human-assisted Korean machine translation services. Instead, I give you access to my own services as a professional Korean translator at up to half my regular rate. I also deliver a translation you can trust and understand.

My affordable Korean-to-English document translation process

The following is what you can expect from my budget Korean-to-English document translation service.

Project review and quoting

I will review your document and let you know if it is suitable for my hybrid Korean document translation approach. Some documents have too many formatting complications or are so highly technical and complex that a hybrid translation will not save much or any time. Very short texts also incur workflow overhead that negates the benefits. Word lists with terminology that will have to be looked up one-by-one just to verify accuracy also require an extra effort that isn’t “hybrid friendly.”

Furthermore, scanned documents have to be converted to editable Word file format. Optical-character recognition works in many cases if the scan is crisp and clear. However, if the source file is fuzzy, handwritten, or too small, I will have to go through extra steps to process the file in Word before I can input the text into my translation process.

I will take all of these factors into account when quoting the job to you. For this reason, I cannot tell you in advance how much cheaper the hybrid Korean translation workflow will be than my premium process, or even if the hybrid workflow will be a realistic option for your particular document.

Translation of the Korean text into English

After we’ve agreed on the project terms and I have prepared the document in editable format, I’ll import the text into my computer-aided translation (CAT) tool with the machine translation function turned on. In some cases, I may connect multiple machine translation engines at once.

As a first step, I will go through the document sentence by sentence, comparing the meanings of the Korean and English machine translations, editing and settling on a draft translation. This pass through the document ensures 1) I adequately familiarize myself with the source text, and 2) the English translation essentially says the same thing as the Korean source. Along the way, I will fix mistakes of meaning (mistranslations of important concepts, incorrectly transposed numbers, and vague grammatical phrasings).

After the first draft, I will then go back through to perform a monolingual review. This step delivers a final polishing. While much less intense than my regular edit workflow, the second pass through the translation is still more value-generating than the one-step process of a standard Korean PEMT or other human-assisted Korean machine translation workflows. My two-step process ensures delivery of a hybrid translation that you can use with confidence.

Condition of the output

The hybrid translation I provide will, to the best of my knowledge and ability, be a correct rendering of the Korean source. It will not be fully polished. You may still find typographical and grammatical errors. Also, some nuances of the source will not have been communicated fully in every instance, and terminology will not necessarily be industry standard or entirely consistent. I will not make a significant formatting effort. As with any complex process, mistranslations may infrequently sneak through as well, though I will diligently follow the above process to prevent this.

My goal with the hybrid Korean translation is not to achieve quality parity with my premium Korean-to-English translation service. Instead, I focus on eliminating critical errors, omissions, and ambiguities in the machine translation output that would otherwise reduce the usefulness of the translation to your purposes, while also making some cosmetic and stylistic improvements along the way.

The advantages

The following are the advantages of my affordable Korean-to-English document translation service over raw machine translation and conventional Korean PEMT.

  1. You will have confidence that the translation is correct. Therefore, you won’t be left doubting an entire machine-translated document just because unknown portions of it may or may not be correct.
  2. You will receive a better overall translation than either edited or unedited machine translation, including standard Korean PEMT and other human-assisted Korean machine translation services. My translation for you will be backed by my “Consistently Good Work” Pledge.