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The Language is All Backwards I'm told that Korean is one of the hardest languages in the world for English-speakers to learn. When I was first studying the language, I didn't really sense this though. Spanish had seemed pretty hard to me too and improving my Korean appeared to...
I'm Not Fluent! The only proper first answer to this question is, "I'm not fluent." Fluency implies a level of comfort in the language that I don't ever expect to achieve. The word I've used for at least the last ten years or so is "proficient" and even that is...
I love the way every official document in Korea about someone includes their birthdate. It tells you something about the culture and the importance Koreans place on age.
I’ve gotten help with a particular Korean grammatical construction twice now already (Post#1, Post#2) Today, my colleague D. Bannon emailed me as follows: [Here are] my two bits on the “that’s what I wanna know” discussion. I asked this question years ago, back in the 80s, but never found a...
A few months ago I posted an answer from a Korean linguist about a grammatical point that had stumped me for a long time. (Click here for original post.) Just recently, another kind linguist, “Xwind”, shared more insights on this matter which has further helped me to grasp the nuance. ...
Background: How it All Started Koreans are forever referring to a digestive problem called “체하다”. I’ve always wondered if it’s just “indigestion”? Or something more? All I could decipher is that it seems to happen for no good reason. Google Dictionary is no help: Yahoo! turns out to be more...
D. Bannon, my associate and a leading Korean translator, has released a new article in Translation Journal about subtitling. It’s a scholarly treatment of the subject and one that any translator of movie subtitles should read: “Subtitling: The Role of Trans-modal Translation in Global Cinema,” Translation Journal, Vol. 14 No....
Some files are just like that; they come with a disproportionate number of confusing phrasings that are easy to misunderstand. We had a job like this last week and when I went back to check my team’s work, I came across error after error and ended up re-proofing the entire...
This is an actual email I received this week. It was broadcast out to me and 30-40 other translators at the same time: Hi. We urgently need help. Have any of you ever done translations that are billed in gigabytes? If so, how is this done? How much does it cost...
I was just asked this week when the ATA is going to offer a certification exam in Korean. While it's been discussed in the ATA's Korean Language Division, I don't think much has been done to move the process forward and my guess is that it won't happen soon. Apparently...
