Korean Job Discussion Forums

charliebrown84 · Joined: 29 Jul 2009 Location: Daegu, South Korea

I was at Korean class the other day and one of the other English teachers there said she was getting paid to edit papers for Korean college professors. I've been looking for some side work that won't get me tossed from my legit job and think this would be a great thing to get into.

If anyone has any advice about how to get into something like this, or if such a side-job exists, please let me know.

Thanks Smile

peppermint · Posted: Tue Jun 08, 2010 6:13 am Post subject:

Everyone thinks they can do work like that, but very few people can do it well enough to get paid for it. That kind of work does exist- I did quite a lot of it for a few years but turnaround time is often very, very tight; standards are high; and the pay isn't great.

Teaching adults will generally lead to an occasional request to look over a proposal or term paper from time to time. It generally turns out to be 30+ pages of semi coherent rambling, and compensation is often dinner with the student. For more formal work, you generally have to proofread a piece of writing that they provide, within a certain time frame, keeping in mind not just spelling, grammar and punctuation, but also things like formatting and word choice.

PatrickGHBusan · Posted: Tue Jun 08, 2010 6:15 am Post subject:

Not to mention that doing editing on the side still requires you get permission from your employer and from immigration in order for it to be legal...

bish · Joined: 09 Jun 2007

Hyeon Een · Joined: 24 Jun 2005

Boring is the key point. I do quite a lot these days. Most of it is in an office, not freelance. It sucks. With a lot of the drivel I'm given I end up giving it a read through, then completely rewriting it without looking at the original again. It's harder to edit than to rewrite in a lot of cases. The most recent debacle was some nonsense that had been provided by a professional translating company as well. They thought it'd just take a few minutes to edit each page. It took a lot longer..

This was for brochures, websites, letters, presentations etc. An academic paper could probably not be rewritten off the top of one's head!

Translating in conjunction with editing can pay quite well, so if you know a Korean with pretty good English who can translate something, which you then edit it can be worthwhile. I work with a Korean guy occasionally and the pay usually works out at $100 a page. This is WAY above what I hear of other people getting.. so I guess usually middlemen take a big cut somewhere along the way.

Anyway, my idea of hell would be an 8hr a day office job just doing editing. Hmm, that or 8 hours of kindergarten. I guess the editing would be slightly better.

furtakk · Joined: 02 Jun 2009

I've seen some postings from time to time on the job board. However, most of the jobs I've seen require a high level of Korean proficiency because they require translation as well as editing.

This was posted recently:
http://www.eslcafe.com/jobs/korea/index.cgi?read=42664

Kinda ridiculous really. 2.5 for 11 hour days and no apartment compensation. No Thanks.