사람이 쓴 글
What to settle before the language pair
What's missing from 'translate this into English' — the term table, the fidelity dial, and ambiguous source text.
이 가이드는 영어로 쓰였습니다. 한국어판 읽기
What makes this hard
'Translate this into Korean' fixes only the language pair. What actually divides translation work is what is being translated. Marketing copy and contracts have opposite rules — the first may restructure sentences for flow; in the second, one shifted nuance is an incident.
Left without instructions, three things happen quietly. Company and product names get translated at will, cultural references and wordplay vanish or turn stiff without a note, and ambiguous passages get resolved by the AI's own interpretation. None of the three is visible from the output alone.
What to add to the request
1. Give the do-not-touch list
A table of fixed translations, names left untranslated, and rules for numbers, units, and dates. A short list is fine — its existence alone signals 'don't change the rest freely either.'
2. Set the literal-vs-free dial and the register
'Make it natural' is not an instruction. Decide whether sentence structure may change and what formality level to hit, from the document's use and reader. Add that one source sentence becoming two target sentences is not an error — it prevents artificially glued-together long sentences.
3. Ambiguity gets flagged, not resolved
Put it like this
Add nothing, drop nothing. Where the source alone can't settle the meaning, don't pick an interpretation — mark it as a translator's note. If there are none, write 'no ambiguous passages'.
Demand the 'if none, say none' — otherwise the notes section quietly disappears.
Checklist for writing it yourself
- 1Did you say what's being translated (contract, marketing, technical doc, subtitles)
- 2Did you give the fixed-term and proper-noun table
- 3Did you set fidelity and register
- 4Did you forbid additions and omissions
- 5Did you define how ambiguity is handled (notes)
읽었으면 직접 해 보는 편이 빠릅니다.
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