South Korea has both an interesting history and a fascinating language. The country shot from being one of the world’s poorest to being a high-income country in just a few decades, following its division from North Korea. Its increasing prominence on the global stage and appetite for international relations gave rise for significant demand for translation services.
More recently, South Korea’s need for language services pivoted to focus on medical translation as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. The country was one of the first to be hit be a significant outbreak of COVID-19 cases, meaning that the need for it to learn from China’s experience – and to share its own experience with other countries – was great.
It was this need that prompted a recent request for Tomedes’ business translation expertise. Understandably, our translators have been in plenty of demand recently, as the world fights against the deadly coronavirus. You can read a further example of our work in this area by clicking the link below.
Read more: English to Spanish COVID-19 Medical Translation
Tomedes has been translating documents into and out of Korean for well over a decade. Our experienced, native translators cover a wide range of sector specialisms, including medical translation and business translation, as was required by our recent client, who needed us to translate his COVID-19 safety guidelines from English to Korean.
There are more than 75 million native Korean speakers spread around the world. South Korea is home to 48 million of them and North Korea to 24 million. There are also sizeable communities of Korean speakers in China (over two million of them), the US (around one million) and Japan (500,000).
Korean is a language isolate (or at least a member of a language micro-family) which, unlike nearby Chinese and Vietnamese, is not tonal in nature. Accent and pitch do not change the meaning of words, making it easier for many English speakers to learn than its tonal counterparts.
For our recent Korean translations, only the most accurate, high-quality translation service would suffice – hence the client turning to Tomedes for support!
In terms of essential businesses, few institutions are so important in global terms as the world’s medical communities. That’s the case usually, let alone during the coronavirus outbreak. While individuals are practising social distancing and taking precautionary measures, medical professionals are racing to treat hundreds of thousands of COVID-19 patients around the world, while also working together to seek a vaccine.
Within this environment, COVID-19 safety guidelines and announcements have become a top priority for those sharing information with fellow medics. Yet they are far from the only ones who have had to deliver key details in multiple languages. From local authorities to accommodation providers, the sharing of advice on proper hygiene, handwashing and disinfection has been a top priority in the recent weeks and months.
This was what prompted our recent client to get in touch. His business needed to share key details with its clients in both English and Korean. They had taken care of the English version; we stepped in to provide the Korean copy.
In addition to translation, Tomedes also provides professional localization services. Localization helps to shape copy so that it suits a particular audience. The idea is that the resulting document will read as though it was written for that audience in the first place.
There is a great deal of finesse in providing accurate localization services. Many businesses use these services as part of their globalization strategy, as they seek to foster local connections in order to win and retain customers.
Key to localization is the provision of expert linguists who have a deep cultural knowledge of the audience in question. That’s why Tomedes has spent well over a decade building up our network of translation and localization specialists around the world. We ensure that our team have the right skills to ensure that each and every client’s copy can be localized perfectly, in order to provide it with maximum impact.
In the case of this client, we provided a native Korean speaker to translate and localize his document, ensuring that it would be ideally suited to the linguistic and cultural expectations of its intended audience of Korean speakers.
The coronavirus pandemic has impacted entire countries in ways never before seen in peacetime. It has put incredible pressure on medical services and a huge range of essential businesses. Tomedes has been supporting both the medical and the business community with our language services, from translation and localization to over the phone interpretation.
If your business needs to communicate in more than one language, the Tomedes team is here to help. Speak to one of our helpful account managers today to explore your translation and other language service options.
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