Why machine translation still fails for Korean ↔ English

Google Translate has gotten remarkably good. So why does professional Korean–English translation still command a premium? Because the hardest five percent is exactly where machines break.

The honorifics problem

Korean bakes social relationship directly into its grammar. A machine picks one register and applies it uniformly — which is how a friendly email ends up sounding like a legal summons.

Context a machine can't see

Translation isn't word replacement; it's intent replacement. A human translator asks. A machine guesses.

How I approach it

Every project is handled or vetted by a translator native in both languages — me. I translate for intent first, then read it back until it stops sounding translated and starts sounding written.