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Korean Translation Services

Korean is spoken by 66 million people. North and South Korea both use it as their official language. There are also large communities of Korean-speaking people in China and in the United States. This language is something of a puzzle for linguists. Some of them consider it to be related to Japanese. Others consider it to be its own language on the whole. This language is vital for entering into the extremely vibrant market that South Korea represents. It is also very unique among Asian languages, in several regards, principally in its written form.

A Westerner looking at most written Northern Asian languages properly guesses that what they're looking at are word pictures. In Korean, the written word is phonetic. In the 15th Century, Sejong the Great realized that literacy was vital to the nation. To that end, he replaced the Kanji writing-the Chinese form famous for its complexity-with a phonetic alphabet called Hangul. This is one of the most distinctive forms of writing anywhere and even non-Korean speakers can readily recognize Korean letters. The fact that their written language is so readily-accessible to all members of their society is a source of historical and current national pride in the nation.

The word Korean, as is the case with many English names for places, people and languages, is a bastardization of a word: "Goryeo". This dynasty ruled Korea at the time that westerners first visited Korea and, much as "No Name" Alaska became Nome, Alaska, the empire of Goryeo became Korea. Today this language is increasingly popular in the technical fields. South Korea manufactures a large share of the world's electronic components, produces much of the animation seen in popular films and is rapidly becoming an economic and cultural powerhouse worldwide.

Korean is very important on the Internet. Because of its phonetic written form, it works very well for pages and email. South Korea is famously wired and is making great strides toward increasing its presence on the world business stage. The language does have several different dialects but, in a rather odd twist, most speakers of different dialects can understand each other just fine. This means that this market is even more readily accessible, as there are few hindrances within the language itself. Korean is unintelligible to Westerners without specific training in the language and successfully translating it from English or to English requires great proficiency in the language.