Korean Job Discussion Forums

[mithridates]

...is generally not all that fun. I like reading Korean but sometimes when I get asked to translate something I don't enjoy it all that much. When looking at something from a language more similar to the target language you can go bit by bit, but with Korean to English you have to read the whole sentence, keep the idea in your head and then imagine how it should look when writing it in English.
Um...I'm not explaining this well, so here's an example.

�� ����� Ŀ�Ǹ� ���̴� - That person drank the coffee. Fine.
�� ����� Ŀ�Ǹ� ���̴ٰ� ģ������ ��⸦ �����. - I heard from my friend that that person drank the coffee. Now it's backwards but since there are still only two parts to it things are still okay.

�� ����� Ŀ�Ǹ� ���̴ٰ� ģ������ ����� ȸ���� ������� ������� ȭ�� ����, �� �� ���� ������ �Ƴ��� �̼�ȭ���� ��ȭ�� �� ����� �ߴµ� �� �޾Ƽ� ���� ���� ��⸦ �Ϸ� ������� �ߴ�.

What?!?!?! Okay.

Bongsong Kim, the president of the company, became angry when he heard from his friend that that person had drunk the coffee, tried phoning his wife Seonhwa Lee who had gone out the day before but she didn't pick up the phone and he decided to leave the house to go talk with her directly.

Phew...I made that sentence up myself and it was still annoying to translate. Koreans seem to like really long sentences and rarely use one adjective when they can use three or four. I often have to take an awkward sentence like the one above and turn it into three or four.
I'm sure some people have had this experience, even if you don't translate for money there are probably times when a person will show you something and ask what it means; you understand it and are about to explain but first you have to put all the parts in order before you start talking....do you really understand Korean? - they say, hurry up and tell me what it means. Grr.

Anyway that's why I respect Korean-English and English-Korean translators/interpreters, same with Japanese to English and so on, because they have to work twice as hard as others.

That's also why I don't like talking with Koreans who insist on putting English into the mix, which just makes it awkward. Either 100% one or the other, but not a mix. That's horrid.

[Chillin' Villain]

Word... One of my best friends is a simulaneous interpreter in Korean, and I have no idea how the hell he does it; two years in that Monterrey translation school's master's program probably helped I guess, but man... It is certainly more than a word-for-word deal once those longer sentences and massive multi-phrase adjectives come into play.

I've been proofing essays by some students in a translation/interpretation college prep school in Kangnam, and their writing is an exact example of what the OP is talking about. I'll read what they're trying to express from the Korean source, and sure enough, it often becomes a hyper-extended windy sentence in the translation. I help 'em out with it sometimes, but other times I make 'em figure it out for themselves.... It's the same as the OP mentioned- I tell them they have to read the whole Korean sentence (sometimes even the whole paragraph) for its general meaning, then just rewrite the thing in English, without even thinking about the Korean, really (if that makes sense)....

That's why I think "interpretation" is a good term, because they've really gotta change stuff around sometimes... Respect to my buddy who does it simultaneously hearing the speaking only once!

[Ody]

interesting.
as one who teaches writing, yet doesn't understand a lick of Koean, your posts explain a lot.
thanks for sharing.

ps: i love adjectives!

[Chillin' Villain]

Adjectives are awesome and great (and occasionally redundancy is too, sometiimes), but I'm talking writing that is so positively FULL of appositives that you start catching yourself speaking that way!

For example....

Chillain Villain, possessor of an extremely dumb Dave's ESL Cafe moniker who has been spending the better part of the day falling asleep at his desk and making internet messageboard posts about everything from adjective-saturated translations to New Year's Eve plans, is ready to go home.

Y'know? So long that they obscure the primary meaning of the sentence. I exaggerate, but only a little... And it really is done almost every other sentence... I don't really blame it on the students or their lack of creativity per se; it's a just a matter of how things are expressed differently in the two languages, and a sort of myopic view of translation.[/i]

[matthewwoodford]

[mithridates]

The best thing you can do is know your own limit and tell the person you're working for about it before you start. If you overestimate the amount you can do every day it can be quite hellish.
Like CV said, the best thing you can do is read the whole sentence over once, try to grasp the meaning, write it out as you remember it in English and then take another look at the sentence to see if you've missed any words.
But I really don't like translating, unless perhaps for a game I like personally. RPGs and such...
The document I'm translating right now is really long and convoluted but luckily the guy keeps saying the same things so it's gotten easier, though still boring...

[mithridates]

That's why I've been so omnipresent here recently because I'm constantly online and I check here whenever my head hurts.

[Swiss James]

What's the deal with repeating stuff so often anyway? I've been in meetings where the translator has started off translating everything that's said and then after a few times of just making the same point in a different way she'll say
"Now he's just saying the same thing again"
....
...
"He just keeps saying the same thing"

We both find it difficult to keep a straight face sometimes.

[mithridates]

It's weird...when you become a translator you realize how often people repeat themselves.
Imagine being Joo's translator.

Saddam Hussein would had done worse if he had gone free
The blog is a fake
How did an Iraqi woman get an education in the 90s

[Ody]

[OCOKA Dude]

Translators/interpreters are a dime a dozen, and their qualilty varies. Most of the time, they're just totally making it up and filling in the blanks with what they think the person said. Fact is that it's impossible to perfectly translate someone's Korean into English or vice versa unless there's a personal relationship or history between the two. Otherwise, so much is being lost, and the translation should really be taken with a grain of salt.

Also, in terms of professional Korean-English translation, where Korean documents or reports are translated into English for publication, even the best translators cannot render konglish-free or even semi-credible English-language copy.

It takes a skilled native-English speaking copy editor to hammer out all the Korean-style redundancies, lack of article sense, appositives, cultural cliches, archaic expressions, unqualified statements, gaps in logic/fact sets/information, exaggerations, oversimplifications, logical fallacies galore, chauvinistic/ethnocentric/sexist/racist statements, preposterous reasoning, old-wives' type of thinking, and other general weirdness in order to make it believable -- let alone readable to an English-speaking audience.

I've done copyediting now for two years for Korean companies and let me tell you, not only is it a royal pain in the ass, it's a real b**** having to tell the Korean corporate clients that they would be laughed off the face of the earth if they insist on remaining faithful to the original Korean to English translation. Also, most Korean-English translators are native Korean speakers, thus will always translate using a Korean filter, which is appropriate. However, a good copy editor must recognize that filter and either neutralize or replace it when rendering acceptable English-language copy that is rhetorically, syntactically and grammatically credible.

[mithridates]

I remember translating a speech from Japanese into English a long time ago and there was a part where he says something along the lines of
"We will make this world into a future for our children"...something like that. I gave the translated copy in but then some Japanese hotshot lawyer 'proofread' the document changing that line into
"We will make future world"
among other 'corrections'.