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Why Korea?
South Korea is home to a highly motivated society that cares deeply about globalization, with an exceptionally successful diaspora and a local population that values foreign perspectives and products.
Over the last fifty years, South Korea has enjoyed the greatest increase in per-capita GDP in all of Asia, and is now known for industry heavy-hitters such as the Samsung, Hyundai and LG conglomerates.
These Korean companies were early investors in the BRIC countries — Brazil, Russia, India, and China — and place a strong emphasis on global strategies.
Korea is also fast becoming known for its cultural exports. South Korean television dramas and Korean pop music have gained a strong foothold in countries from India to Iran, grossing more than US$150 million in the first half of 2013 and raising global awareness of this once-overlooked country.
Now a member of the G-20 forum of wealthy nations, Korea’s highly-educated population (boasting 100% literacy) has become a prized market, with consumer affordability levels among the highest in the world.
With the world’s fastest average Internet connection speed and the highest level of broadband penetration in the world, South Korea and the Korean diaspora are an important audience to reach from wherever you are in the world, provided you are prepared to carefully localize and translate all necessary materials.
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What makes Korean translation unique?
It is not hard to find a translation agency offering Korean translations.
The hard part is finding an agency that has a nuanced understanding of
1) the language’s unique structure and ramifications on quality and pricing
2) how to find and recruit the most elite linguists and translators
3) how to design an effective quality assurance workflow that maximizes the abilities of their team without driving up costs.
Be careful with translation agencies who are unaware of how to assess Korean translation projects, who drastically overcharge or undercharge for projects – the latter leading to missed deadlines and low-quality finished products.
If you work with the Korean peninsula, you have probably seen some startling examples of these low-quality translations. Unfortunately, these translations are not limited to restaurant menus and shop windows: they even appear in government press releases and high-profile advertisements.
Korean is a highly complex language, encoding within its grammar many important nuances that can be difficult to translate well into languages with different grammatical structures. When translating Korean to and from languages like English, Spanish, or Chinese, there are a number of common pitfalls that trip up novice translators.
For an important translation, we highly recommend entrusting the job to a professional rather than to a bilingual coworker who lacks training in translation. An awkward translation can hurt your company’s reputation, or even incur liability. A high-quality translation will read as if it were originally written in the target language, respecting form and style, and will win you the respect of your global customers.
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About Meridian Linguistics: Korean Translation Specialists
Meridian Linguistics has a proven track record of producing high-quality Korean translations, to and from English, Spanish, Chinese, and more.
These translations have included legal contracts, patents, company websites, and press releases; for clients as varied as Naver, Airbnb, the Korean National Assembly, and more.
Our linguists are bicultural, bilingual and often have a Master’s degrees in law, translation, or medicine.