While enjoying K-Pop content, you strongly demand Korean content translation, such as Korean Drama. Of course, the best way is to learn Korean, but it takes time.
Why is it hard to translate Korean into other languages?
The Korean language is part of a hypothesized language family called “Ural-Altaic.” The Ural-Altaic hypothesis stated that two essentially separate language families ― Uralic and Altaic ― were part of one enormous “superfamily” instead. Uralic languages include Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian, with Altaic languages comprising Mongolian, Turkish, Japanese, and Korean.
Most European Languages, including English, are part of Indo-European languages. For example, the difference between Korean and English is the word order: Subject, Object, Verb, and Subject, Verb, Object. Therefore, the online-based machine translation service was incorrect in the early stage.
Companies started adopting the human-translated corpus to increase machine translation accuracy.
One of the translation companies in South Korea, Flitto (KOSDAQ: 300080), sells its corpus to US-based IT companies to contribute to the machine translation service more accurately in 2019 and 2020.
Naver (KRX: 035420) is aggregating its corpus from its users. The company is operating its “Translation participation” service for its users. Canon is making its translation service more accurate.
Then what is the most accurate machine-based translation service to Translate Korean?
1. Naver Papago
Naver Papago is a multilingual machine translation cloud service provided by Naver. The service uses a neural machine to learn from its mistakes and learn what type of translations the user requires. The word “Papago” comes from Esperanto’s word for “parrot,” Esperanto being a constructed language.
Launched in July 2019, the application provides Korean, Japanese, Chinese, English, Spanish, and French translation. From November 2019, Papago was changed to be available without Internet service.
2. Google Translate
Google Translate is a free multilingual neural machine translation service developed by Google to translate text and websites from one language into another. It offers a website interface, a mobile app for Android and iOS, and an application programming interface that helps developers build browser extensions and software applications.
As of November 2020, Google Translate supports 109 languages at various levels and, as of April 2016, claimed over 500 million total users, with more than 100 billion words translated daily.
3. Kakao I Translate
Kakao (KRX: 035720) has various AI services. The Kakao I Translate is one of the features of its AI engine.
The translation even reflects Korean language translation, including literary style, conversational style, and honorifics. The application works over an artificial neural network by Kakao. In addition, the translation service supports the Kakao Chatbot interlinkage feature.
As of November 2020, Kakao I Translate supports Korean, Chinese, Japanese, English, Spanish, French, Hindi, Thai, Russian, Malaysian, Bengali, Vietnamese, Arabic, Italian, Indonesian, Turkish, Portuguese, and German.
4. Flitto
Unlike other translations above, Flitto focuses on human-powered translation. The company believes that machine-based translation is limited and cannot reflect the cultural background now.
The platform is based on crowdsourcing over the globe. You can access the service via iOS, Android, or Web environment.
The service supports text, image, and voice translations and 1:1 translation in 25 different languages (Arabic, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Vietnamese, and Finnish.
5. GenieTalk
HANCOM (KOSDAQ: 030520) – a Korean office application SW enterprise – provides its translation via its application in Android and iOS. It is Genie Talk. You can translate Korean via voice, text, and image. Furthermore, the application supports an offline translation environment.
The service supports 29 languages in both directions, including Korean-English, Korean-Japanese, Korean-Chinese, Korean-Spanish, and Korean-French.
6. Microsoft Translator
Microsoft Translator is a multilingual machine translation cloud service provided by Microsoft. Microsoft Translator is integrated across multiple consumers, developers, and enterprise products.
The service supports 73 language systems as of May 2020. It also supports 11 speech translation systems that currently power the Microsoft Translator live conversation feature, Skype Translator, and Skype for Windows Desktop, and the Microsoft Translator Apps for iOS and Android.
7. Waygo Translator
Waygo Translator is an offline translator focusing on Asian languages. The application is specialized in its visual translation. In addition, the application lets you translate the language into English.
The cons of the application are the limitation. Free translations are provided ten times a day. Otherwise, upgrading your plan for complete translation would be best.
One more thing to discuss regarding your language.
If your language has similar word orders to Korean, we recommend using the translator directly. However, the accuracy has been raised for English due to the purchase of corpus from the business players.
For other European languages, we recommend translating from Korean to English first. Then, please translate English into your language. It will make it more accurate to translate the source.
Enjoy Korean content!
