One translator. Both languages. Every project handled personally.

People ask how one person can be truly native in both Korean and English. The honest answer is that I didn’t study my way there — I was raised into it, in a sequence of places that happened to line up perfectly.

I was born to Korean parents, so Korean came first: spoken at home, never a “heritage language” I had to reclaim later. Then, from kindergarten through third grade, I was educated entirely in English at the American School of Warsaw. That’s the part most people can’t fake — an accent-free English formed early, before the ear sets.

From third to eighth grade I was back in Seoul, inside the Korean school system — which, if you’ve been through it, you know is relentless. That’s where my Korean was sharpened to a genuinely native, academic standard, not just conversational fluency.

Then, from thirteen to twenty-eight, the United States. I spent five-plus years working as a paralegal — a job that is, essentially, professional precision in written English under pressure. Contracts, filings, deadlines, zero tolerance for ambiguity. Looking back, it was the perfect training for translation; I just didn’t know it yet.

Why I went boutique

When I started translating professionally, I made a deliberate choice not to become an agency. Agencies scale by handing your project to whoever is available — and in the Korean–English market, “available” too often means someone strong in one language and merely okay in the other. That gap is where errors hide and budgets get spent twice. I’d rather do fewer projects and personally stand behind every one.

So I work in one language pair only, Korean ↔ English, and I turn down work outside my strengths. Every project is handled or vetted by me, start to finish. When you hire this practice, you always know exactly who is translating your material.

The work I’m proudest of

The project that best captures what I do is Alexander Shvets’ programming book, Dive Into Design Patterns. I was chosen from more than fifty applicants as its sole official Korean translator — dense technical concepts, diagrams, and code, all rendered into natural Korean that engineers read without ever noticing it was translated. That last part is the whole point.

I’ve since scored a perfect 100 on the ATA quality index, earned Top Rated Plus status across the major platforms, and worked as a freelance gaming translator for Tencent. But the number I care about most is the one you can’t put on a résumé: how often a client comes back.

My whole philosophy, in one sentence

A translation should read like it was written in the target language from the start — not converted, not “good enough,” but written. Everything I do is in service of that.