Korean Job Discussion Forums

[mindmetoo]

I'm working with an English-to-Korean translator. For a publisher, our job is to make transcripts of TV shows (my job) and then translate the transcript into Korean (her job). It's pretty sweet. Pays about 30,000 won an hour. The publisher provides the videos in AVI format. I sit in Starbucks with my laptop, a pair of headphones, and drink coffee and make transcripts. I'm a fast typist and have my own typing shorthand which also speeds things up. (You don't keep typing a character's name over and over again, just stub it in with a two letter code. Rx for Raymond. And then at the end do a find replace on your stubs. Voila.)

Anyway, I guess the publisher then publishes the English and Korean in some monthly magazine for people who want to learn English this way. They can read the TV, movie, and news English shows side by side with the Korean. I noticed some books like this in Kyobo. For example, one page of the Harry Potter book is English, the facing page is the matching Korean.

The translator is pretty good but certain idioms she stumbles on so she pings me over IM to get me to clarify these idioms. To sort of cut out the middle man, idioms I'm sure she'll have trouble with I embed a brief explanation within the transcript for her. I embed my idiom clarifications between [[[ ]]]. A dot.com I used to work at we used our own home brewed ASP-like mark up code called Bracketland. Shudder. Instead of putting code between greater than and less than signs, the original developer used three square brackets to open the tag and three square brackets to close the tag. Shudder. After four years at this job, I'm just used to doing this.

This month I'm working on Everybody Loves Raymond. It's kind of bizarre to re-read my transcripts and the rather objective wording I use to clarify some rather touchy idioms.

Here's some from this month:

"You screwed the pooch." [[[Having sexual intercourse with a dog, slang for doing a bad thing.]]]

"Both of my sons are whipped!" [[[Short for "p_ussy whipped". P_ussy is slang for a woman's vagina, hence "controlled by a vagina" or a man who is controlled by a woman.]]]

"That column you did in grammar school about noogies versus wedgies��" [[[A noogie is hitting someone on the head with your knuckles. A wedgie is coming up behind a person and pulling his underwear tight up his ass crack to cause pain and public humiliation. These are things young boys do to each other on playgrounds.]]]

[komtengi]

sounds like a good job