Have you ever received a poor quality Korean to English translation? Read to see what you need to do whenever this happens.
If you get a poor-quality Korean-English translation, it’s a good idea to get a third-party review. Third-party review acts as a safeguard by catching the errors in a document. However, over the past year we’ve received an increasing number of requests to perform work as a third-party reviewer. It has revealed another side of the translation process we didn’t know too much about before. Here’s what we’ve learned about what happens to Korean-English translation projects after they are delivered to the client or customer who has made the request.
The clients making such requests typically have the original Korean-English translation work done by an external translation agency, and sometimes an in-house translator. However, there have been cases where one of the customers or partners of the client brings up an issue with the translation. That’s where we come in as third-party reviewers. The client seeks out our help to figure out what, if anything, went wrong with the translation.
In many cases the “translation issues” involves little more than an awkward sentence, a few stilted phrases, or something that was translated too literally. However, in other cases there are critical issues revealed during our review. Increasingly, we see translations that were completed by translators who are clearly not native speakers, and in many cases, do not appear to have much working knowledge of concepts relating to the field of the source document.
We have a long-term relationship with these clients, and our neutral opinion is relied upon. We know that our decisions could have a direct impact on the language agency and/or the translators in their employ. As such, we take our time to review carefully, and see if something was a stylistic error, or an absolutely critical and objective translation error.
Early on, when we would fill out a report of translation issues, the client would circle back to the original translation agency for corrections, and then show us the end product for final approval. However, it seems that even after these issues are pointed out, the problem occurs again, or is simply ignored.
After a few experiences with reviewing poor translations, we’ve noticed another trend. Some clients will simply look for another translation agency or translator to re-translate the work, rather than trying to go back and forth with the original translation team.
The takeaway is that, even if a client has no knowledge of Korean (or any other language they may be placing a request in), it should not be assumed that translations delivered will be automatically considered accurate. Some clients don’t always have the extra budget to perform third party reviews on all their translations, so indeed, there are often faulty translations that fall through the cracks. In today’s business environment translation mistakes can have immediate and costly consequences. Third-party reviews and spot checks are one way to safeguard the ongoing quality of the Korean translations you are ordering.
Make sure the Korean-English translators your agency is using are 1) native speakers, 2) fully proficient and confident in the subject matter relating to their assigned translation project(s), 3) certified.
Contact us today for our third party review service. We are experienced in identifying and repairing a bad translation.