Lingo24 Company Blog

Last Thursday, a group of professional translators and interpreters founded South Korea’s first national association for their professions; the aim of the association is to improve the country’s generally poor standard of translations. The Korean Association of Translation and Interpretation or KATI as it is known, is the only such recognised Association in its field; the Association’s inaugural meeting was held at the Press Centre in the nation’s Capital, Seoul, with over 100 invited members present.

The Association’s Director Ms Kim Ji-myung said that the Association would serve as a national resource for users to locate reliable and quality translation resources and went on to pinpoint several reasons for the country’s poor level of translation output.

Firstly she related that many complaints from Government and foreign clients stem from the use of poor quality or unqualified interpreters and translators due to a general ignorance about how to go about finding good quality reliable ones.

Ms Kim Ji-myung also said that some of the reason behind the inferior output by translators & interpreters stemmed from the client’s understanding as to what translation actually entailed. Many clients, including the government failed to realise that translation required much more than the pure transliteration of words; for a successful Korean translation in fact, something of the cultural implications of the language had to be passed on in order for non-Koreans to comprehend the true meaning behind the originator’s words. A quality translator, therefore, had to have a good understanding of Korean history, sociology and culture.

Applicants wishing to join KATI must first of all have at least three years experience as a translator or interpreter, be qualified in at least one of the following languages; English, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, French, Spanish, German & Arabic and additionally pass through a stringent selection process before final approval by the Association. In the future, the Association is looking to introduce a national licensing scheme under its auspices.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 24th, 2008 at 7:26 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.