Korean to French Translation

Do not translate word for word

Korean and French belong to two different language families (Koreanic and Indo-European, respectively) and, in general, they have quite a few differences when it comes to vocabulary, language structure, and communication. When it comes to cultural difficulties, France and Korea differ from each other significantly, as well. All of this has a tremendous influence on Korean to French translation.

This means that when you translate Korean to French, a lot of nuances should be taken into account, and word-for-word translation should be avoided. For example, in Korean, the Subject-Object-Verb word order is the most common, while in French Subject-Verb-Object is used more often. Disregarding just this one nuance will make your Korean to French translation sound unnatural. And this is just one example of many.

Pay attention to honorifics

Like many Asian languages, Korean has a highly developed system of honorifics. There are particles, words, and phrases used to show respect and politeness. For different social situations, different honorifics are used in the Korean language.

French does not have an equivalent system of honorifics. Of course, there are polite words and phrases, but it is far from being a system or a grammatical category. Nevertheless, in Korean to French translation, it is important to find the right French equivalents to Korean honorifics for the most accurate translation possible.

Avoid machine translation

Using an electronic dictionary is great when all you need to translate is a word or a simple phrase. However, to translate documents with high-quality results it is essential to avoid machine translation and hire an expert translator who will be able to navigate all the linguistic differences and cultural nuances.

A language isolate

To study languages more effectively, linguists divide them into various groups. One such possible grouping is a language family – a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestral language or parental language called the proto-language of that family. Related languages share some vocabulary and have similarities in their grammatical structure.

Korean is a language isolate – a language that does not belong to any existing family. The language is well-studied, but there is not enough consistent evidence available to add it to any language family, although some linguists argue it belongs to a language family called ‘Altaic’, together with such languages as Turkish and Finnish.

Korean alphabet

Korean often tends to be bundled with Chinese and Japanese as a language that used hieroglyphs. However, while the Korean script may look exotic to the western eye, it is in fact an alphabet, known as Hangul.

Hangul has 24 letters: 14 consonants and 10 vowels. It is written in syllabic blocks with the letters arranged in two dimensions, with letters placed one above/under the other as well as one after the other. In the past, Hangul used to be written top to bottom, right to left, but nowadays most texts are written horizontally left to right.