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It would be great if every project followed a linear, sequential workflow from beginning to end, so that after feeding the source file in at the beginning, the final file at the end pops out as a perfect specimen, with every step having somehow brought the quality closer and closer...
There's a nasty feature in Microsoft Word as it applies to Korean; I have no idea why it's there. My best guess is that it's only supposed to be used with Japanese and Chinese but that Microsoft mistakenly included it for Korean, too. I'm not really sure, though. Perhaps Microsoft...
If you’re translating English business cards into Korean, work with a professional who understands the intricacies of the task and asks enough questions to be able to translate job titles correctly. For example, here are many (but not all) of the possibilities for translating “director” and its variants: 이사 전무...
If you're expecting identical English text to be always translated the same way into Korean, you're in for a big surprise. There can be meaning-related factors involved too, but this tip explains how structural context influences the verb endings used in written Korean. This means that occasionally, the same English source sentence...
The following point may seem obvious: Korean letters don't appear the same in each font. For some reason though, this confuses clients from time to time. Here's the Korean letter chi'ut written in five different fonts: Notice how the line/dot at the top in #3, #4 and #5 is disconnected...
HS, Thanks for the “Last Two, I mean, Three Weeks in Korea” newsletter today. But do you really not understand why Koreans are demanding answers from the government over the Sewol tragedy? If you object to the government protests like that, your readers who don’t have a full understanding of...
A client recently sent me a translation request for a technical user's manual where we had already worked on another manual for the same manufacturer. The client put the translation memory and termbase from our first delivery through a machine translation solution to translate the second manual. He then asked...
President Park just declared Ansan a disaster zone in order to make the city eligible for various federal assistance. I’m sure the mood is amplified for me because I’m so close to ground zero in terms of the school that the missing kids attended, but it feels in Korea just...
As Korean companies expand their operations on the world stage, they are hiring a growing number of non-Koreans for positions both in Korea and overseas. The number of non-Koreans chasing such jobs continues to outpace supply though, especially at the entry level, and so applying effectively is more important than...
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...
