How to Design a Perfect Translation Test

The perfect balance is to design a translation test that’s not too hard where no one ever passes it, but not too easy to the point of attracting too many qualified candidates.

Since the testing phase doesn’t actually generate any revenue, it’s often viewed as a burden and unnecessary step.

We were recently onboarded as a vendor for a major translation company, and in that process, they had us perform a test translation. After viewing the file for a moment or two, it sounded very familiar. A quick Google search showed that the text was actually a translation into Korean of a recent Hollywood movie. While this content was definitely entertaining to read, it did little to gauge our actual translation ability.

To assess translators’ abilities, it's important to look into many different parts of a language. Here are a few things we found extremely helpful for Korean to English translation tests:

Deter Copy and Paste

Sometimes we’ve observed translators copy and pasting the text for test translations into Google Translate, and then trying to edit it into smooth English. As a result, we recommend providing test translations as an image in PDF. Make sure the copy text function is disabled. Of course, it’s still possible for a candidate to re-type the text into a machine translation engine. Doing this just deters them a bit.

Include Hanja Characters

Have a few Hanja characters (the Chinese characters used in Korean). Koreans typically learn some Hanja characters during elementary school. We usually recommend including two “elementary school level” Hanja characters, and one “high school level” Hanja character on translation tests. A novice translator will likely be scared away by the characters, or not even attempt to translate them. Experienced translators, even if they don’t know the characters right away, will know how to do the research and figure it out.

Include several words and phrases that aren’t in the dictionary. These could be slang, industry terms, or idioms. Including this in the test will help you see how the candidates deal with words and phrases they cannot simply look up on the spot.

Have a Good Length

We’ve found that between 300-400 words is the perfect length when designing a test. Anything less than this is sometimes inadequate when it comes to assessing ability. Anything longer will likely result in decreased interest.

Give Them Time

We recommend providing only 24 hours for test completion. There is a risk that with a longer time window, the candidate will try to collude or outsource the work. However, we’ve found it’s important to respect the schedule of the candidate. The candidate could be asked for a particular day they have some availability, and the test could be sent on that morning. We also recommend scheduling the evaluation of the test to be quick. Candidates will be anxious for results, and having the results to them quickly can show some professionalism.

Have space between retakes

We generally recommend that candidates can only take tests once per year.

We have designed many Korean translation tests across a variety of disciplines. Feel free to get in touch if you are looking to improve your Korean translator screening and onboarding process.