Korean Translation

Companies such as MySpace and Standard Chartered Bank trust us with their Korean translations and so can you. We only use experienced in-country linguists to ensure our Korean translations are of the highest quality and most suitable for your intended audience.

The Korean language has many differences from languages such as English, one of the main differences being that Korean has a different word order from that of English.

For example, an English sentence is composed in the order: subject - verb - object. In contrast, a Korean sentence is composed in the order: subject (which is sometimes even omitted) - object - verb. This is a very simple example of the different word order.

The use of punctuation marks is also different from that of the English language. The earlier version of Korean did not use full-stops, colons, semicolons or commas - these punctuation marks were all introduced into Korean in the early 1900s through the efforts of visionary linguistic scholars fighting against Japanese colonial rule of Korea.

When writing, Koreans rarely use colons or semicolons. Sometimes foreigners without sufficient understanding of the Korean language insist that Korean translations must place the colons and semicolons found in the original English source text.

Because the Korean language rarely uses such punctuation marks, translated Korean text does not need to replicate the use of colons and semicolons as in the English text.

Korean Measurements in Translation

Standard measurement units used in Korea are a little different from those used in other countries. In Korean, imperial units like pounds, inches and feet are rarely used. Instead, Korean language uses the metric system (centimetre, metre, gram, kilogram, kilometre etc.) When you want to indicate measurement units in your Korean translation, you will need to consider this in your source documents.

Korean Borrowed Words

The Korean language uses many words that originate from abroad. For instance, a frying pan is said to be "fraipan" in Korean. Furthermore, foreign companies' names are written in Korean in the newspapers however, the names are left in English in commercial brochures, technical manuals and instructions because customers generally want them to be.

You could also allow that English company names are placed in parentheses following their Korean translation. For example, HP would be translated into: 'ei-chi-pi (HP)'. You can specify how you would like your company name handled when you order your translation, or ask for recommendations from us if you are not sure.