Translation from English to Korean and from Korean to English
English to Korean and Korean to English
HumanTranslation is a translation agency that puts the art of human translation in the first place and considers it to be its core value on which the whole business relies. We believe in people, and we engage the best experts across the world to provide high-quality Korean-to-English and English-to-Korean translation services.
We value our team and heavily invest in our translators and editors to keep them toned. They regularly undergo a peer review of their work, and we monitor the customer and editor feedback to make sure their work always stays up to the mark.
We hold in-house workshops to help our specialists find the right balance between translation as art and translation as a business. On the one hand, a text that is pleasant to read can only be written by humans (remember your favorite books), and this is what we stand for. On the other hand, quick turnaround is also important, and sometimes the best way to achieve consistency is to delegate this task to the machine.
By the way, machine translation post-editing can also be provided as part of our Korean translation services! However, we should discuss the desired text quality with the customer in this case as a machine-translated text will still require a lot of human effort to read well – unless it is not meant for this purpose (like a standard technical document that contains separate sentences, for example).
Areas of Expertise
You can determine the area of expertise required for your document by yourself – or you can delegate this task to our managers. Sometimes there are two of them, for instance, a contract with several appendices that contains a purely legal part and a technical description of the products to be supplied. And this requires either a translator who can handle both tasks or dividing the text between two experts with subsequent editing to ensure consistency.
However, these are just routine tasks that we can handle quite well! We provide Korean-to-English and English-to-Korean translation services in the technical, medical, legal, financial, business, and other fields, and we have a pool of translators who have the relevant skills, experience, and credentials. What is more, they have excellent feedback from our customers.
Do not hesitate to send your text to us for a quick quote, and get the world’s best experts working on your document in a matter of minutes.
Certified Translation
If your document is intended for an official institution, you will need to order a certified translation for it. It differs from the standard procedure as the focus is made on accuracy and completeness (and sometimes you need to sacrifice beauty and succinctness to fulfill this requirement).
The translator who can handle this job is required to have appropriate credentials (for example, be on the list of the country’s sworn translators). The translation will be returned to you along with the signed and sealed document compiled by the translator (called affidavit or statement) that will attest to the translation’s completeness and accuracy.
Quality Assurance
Texts require a lot of control to be perfect. Just try controlling your speech for an hour to make it sound impeccable and eliminate unnecessary words, and you will see what we mean.
With that in mind, the translation industry elaborated its own standard that we strictly follow: translation is followed by editing, and editing is followed by proofreading. If you select good specialists for all three stages (and that’s what we are aimed at), you get a high-quality text ready for printing.
Facts about Korean
- Korean is spoken in South and North Korea, but these dialects differ a lot.
- The Korean alphabet (called Hangeul) is really easy to learn. Its appearance may look scary for English speakers used to Latin letters, but it is very logical and you will master it in no time when the primary shock is over.
- Korean takes 17th place in the world by the number of speakers.
- Korean provinces have their dialects named after the appropriate locality.
- October 9th is the day when the Koreans celebrate alphabet day.
- Korean does not seem to have any “relatives” among languages – like Japanese, it stands apart. Still, some similarities with Chinese and Japanese may be observed.
- There are two counting systems in the Korean language that are used for different purposes: the one with figures from 0 to 99 is used to tell the time, age, and number of objects. The other one with numbers over 99 is used for dates, distance, and counting money.
- Korean is a language of the collectivist society. They tend to say “we and “us” in sentences where more individualist-minded English speakers would say “I” or “me”.
- Korean is a really hard nut to crack for English speakers – despite the ease of its alphabet.
Language Tips:
If you translate correspondence, you may need more information from the customer to properly select the greeting. There is no analog of “Dear” (Sir/Madam) in Korean: people are addressed by their job title. What is more, the form of address may change depending on the person’s degree, for instance, so the task is not that easy. Plus, remember that Korean women do not take their husband’s last name, so it would be wrong to address them jointly as Mr. and Mrs. Jones, for instance. All these peculiarities simply mean that you need to ask for additional information at once if you are going to translate a letter or some other document that contains a greeting.
Don’t worry if you have character limitations for your English-to-Korean translation: the same number of Korean characters can convey much more information than English.
Mind the right punctuation in Korean greetings. A standard greeting can be literally translated as “Are you in peace?”, and you respond by echoing the same “question”. A standard English greeting is “Hello”, and be sure not to leave the question mark as it is. The same is to be done to the English response: if it is not a question (though in most cases it is), be sure to put a full stop.
