Life of a Translator
A-KEEP continues its mission to bridge the differences between institutions and corporations by providing Language Access Services (interpreters) to local K-12 Alabama Koreans and various service providers since its inception. The Alabama Council on Developmental Disabilities [ACDD] and A-KEEP came together to build a sustainable service program and are developing an Education Interpreter Certificate for Special Education. We would like to introduce our current staff member and trainee – Joon Lee!
As part of my work for A-KEEP, I have translated some brochures for Alabama agencies working to improve the quality of life for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Through translating the brochures, I came to be quite knowledgeable about the available resources these agencies can provide to assist and advocate for the people. It was good knowing that there are a lot more resource than I thought out there, but at the same time, I was saddened by the fact that people with language barriers can hardly utilize them. “That’s why I am working on this!”, I thought to myself.
Before embarking on this task, I thought translation is merely the rearrangement of the English sentence structure into that of the Korean one and contextually matching English words to Korean words in the dictionary. Rearranging sentence structure was quite what I expected it would be. It became easier over time as I got familiar with the pattern. However, finding appropriate words for certain English words took more than going through a dictionary. In the dictionary many words came off sounding awkward, and some words did not even exist. For a word that I could not find in the dictionary, I had to come up with one myself. Coming up with one word often took me hours because I had to thoroughly understand the content before I was able to pick the word that I think conveys the information as accurately as possible. Although translation can be very time-consuming and a headache from time to time, thinking about the people who may tremendously benefit from it keeps me going.
If you need any Korean-English translation and interpretation service please contact us at hotline@akeep.org
By Junhyup “Joon” Lee