Overview
So, here I want to share my experience with translating Korean even though I wasn’t even able to read it at first. I also tried it with Chinese, but chinese characters are way too complicated. However for Japanese it also should work. The key ingredients are time and passion. Maybe general experience in translating is quite helpful, too. If you check out Distant Sky S5 Ch.1 it was the very first time I came into contact with the Korean language and I think it came out kinda alright. In the following I want to show you how everyone could translate it with today’s technology: The Internet. Of course someone who actually speaks the language will be more confident about the accuracy of their translations, but it works for a series that was abandoned and you are tired of waiting for translations.
Small Steps First
To translate a text without any knowledge about the language itself, it’s important to know the personalities of the characters, the setting and the story. Or in short: Context. This will be the only way to verify the accuracy of your translations. If something sounds stupid but you know the talking character likes to talk nonsense then it might be right.
However in order to look up translations you’ll need to be able to copy and paste the words. Unfortunately you can’t just copy the text from a comic. So go and type those nonsense characters down. This online keyboard works just fine for me. One Korean syllable consists of 2 to 4 or 5 characters. The keyboard creates the correct syllables automatically most of the time. It takes a lot of time but it’s an important step. Don’t try to read it, just type it. After a while you’ll get quite fast since your muscles will remember the keys automatically.
As example i typed down the first few lines of the first chapter of Distant Sky S5:
시…작한다.
응.
조심해야 해 하늘아.
걱정 마!
최대한 신중하고 정확하게 나눠야 해.
돼…됐지?
대체 얼마나 더 가야 할까
나로우주센터 지하로 들어와 반나절은 걷지 않았어?
어떻게 이런 지하통로가 있을 수 있지?
끝이 없어…
정말로 되돌릴 수 있을까
That’s how it looks like on my screen:
Google Translate
