Put your homepage through a machine translator and read the Korean beside the English. Most of it will be right. The terms will be right, the grammar will be right, and a Korean reader will understand every sentence.
That is worth saying plainly. Machine translation of Korean stopped producing nonsense years ago. To read an incoming email, check a competitor’s page, or ship internal documentation, it is the right tool and there is no argument left to have.
The page that has to sell something is a different job. Below are the three places where a correct Korean sentence still costs you the reader — and, since you probably can’t read the output, how to find them anyway.
1. Correct, and nobody writes like that
Take an ordinary line of product copy.
"The all-in-one tool for your team."A word-for-word Korean version comes out as 당신의 팀을 위한 올인원 도구. Nothing in it is wrong. “당신의 팀을 위한” is a faithful for your team, and “올인원” is a real borrowed word that Koreans use.
The version a Korean marketer would write is 팀에 필요한 모든 것, 하나로. — everything your team needs, in one place.
The difference isn’t accuracy. It’s that the first one keeps the English structure: a possessive stack in front of a noun, with a borrowed adjective doing the selling. Korean marketing copy tends to put the promise in plain Korean and land it at the end. Read the two aloud and the first one has an audible seam in it. That seam is the cost, and it’s the kind you can’t quantify — which is exactly why it survives review.
2. The end of the sentence is where Korean puts the weight
This one is structural, and it bites hardest in the sentences that matter most — pricing, terms, eligibility.
"You must apply for renewal at least 30 days before your permit expires,
unless an exemption applies."English can hang a qualifier off the end of a sentence and it stays readable. Korean can’t hold one there in the same way. Translated as-is, the sentence trails off exactly where your reader is trying to work out whether the exemption covers them.
The fix isn’t to cut the exception — cutting it would change what the sentence promises. It’s to give it a sentence of its own:
허가 만료 30일 전까지 갱신을 신청해야 합니다. 다만 면제 대상인 경우는 예외입니다.
Nothing softened, nothing added. The exception simply became findable. If your page has conditions on it, this is where a literal translation quietly does damage: everything is still technically stated, and none of it is where a Korean reader looks for it.
3. Polishing a draft doesn’t change the shape it came in with
This is the one that costs money, because it is usually discovered late.
The instinct, once a draft reads a bit stiff, is to have someone go through and smooth it out sentence by sentence. It rarely works. Sanding a draft leaves the structure of the original underneath — the sentence order, the clause order, the place where the emphasis sits. Each sentence gets better and the page still reads the same way.
What changes it is going back to the meaning and writing the Korean from there, the way a Korean writer would have set it down in the first place. That’s a different task from editing, and it needs your original in front of you rather than the Korean draft.
Which is why “we already have a Korean version, it just needs a polish” is worth pricing out honestly before anyone starts. Sometimes a polish is genuinely all it needs. Sometimes the polish costs more than the rewrite and leaves you with the same problem.
Spotting all three without reading Korean
You don’t need the language to find these. You need one Korean speaker and the right questions.
- Ask them to read a paragraph aloud and watch where they slow down or double back. Hesitation lands on the seams.
- Ask what the sentence is trying to get you to do — not whether it’s correct. “It’s correct” and “it’s persuasive” are answers to different questions, and if you ask the first you will only ever get the first.
- Point at any sentence with a condition in it and ask where the condition is. If it’s stranded at the end, it’s a translation of an English sentence rather than a Korean one.
- Compare lengths. A Korean line that runs noticeably longer than its English source usually means the structure came across with it.
None of this tells you whether the copy is good. It tells you whether it was written or converted, which is the question you can actually answer from outside the language.
The other notes in this set: picking one Korean voice for your whole site, what your layout does when the words become Korean, and what still looks foreign after the Korean is right.
Want this done on your own pages?
Send me one of your pages, in whatever language it’s written in, and tell me what you want in Korean. You get one exact number for the whole project and a timeline before anything is agreed. Projects start at $400, quoted per project by the pages you want in Korean.