John Weisgerber
Mailto: [email protected] Located: San Diego, California USA

Independent Korean Translator

Summary of Korean Translation Skills

I studied Korean at the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center where I graduated at the top of my class on listening, reading, and speaking proficiency tests. During the rest of my Army service I had many opportunities to advance my language skills in Korea. Among my other duties as a linguist, I have translated countless reports, newspaper articles, presentation slides, manuals, etc. both to and from Korean. Every year I was selected to represent my unit at DLI’s World Wide Language Olympics, an annual language competition open to all Dept. of Defense and federal government linguists, where I won a total of seven medals. I have spent the last seven years since leaving the Army working with SYSTRAN Software, Inc. in the field of Natural Language Processing, primarily developing Korean machine translation. This fascinating but frustrating work involved delving deep into Korean linguistics and specialized terminology. In addition, my management responsibilities and efforts to procure development funding from the US Intelligence Community, DoD, and commercial clients has given me broad specialization in business correspondence and information technology. My writing experience includes proposals, white papers, official letters, technical manuals, and even a co-authored research paper published in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence. During this time I completed my degree in Asian Studies with a language specialization in Korean at SDSU, where I was selected as the first-ever Outstanding Graduate of the Asian Studies Dept. in 1999. I am proficient in a wide variety of desktop publishing applications, e.g. MS Office, including web design and HTML. I am very experienced in working with foreign languages on computers, both on and off the Windows platform, and character sets such as Unicode. I also have experience working with translation aids such as Trados.

• Responsible for the development of Korean-English and English-Korean machine translation systems.
• Managed various NLP software development projects, e.g. machine translation, multilingual information retrieval, multilingual collaborative planning, and multilingual controlled language ontologies.
• Research, codify, and implement linguistic rules to improve natural language parsing, translation and generation programs.
• Lexicographical duties include maintenance and expansion of translation dictionary databases.

Korean Linguist / Intelligence Specialist / Team Leader

• Serve as liaison between US and Korean units to ensure smooth communication and coordination.
• Perform interviews, strategic debriefing, and overt/covert tactical interrogation in various languages.
• Collate, report, and present intelligence information, and maintain intelligence database.
• Perform summary, extract, or full translation/interpretation to or from Korean or Spanish.

Translation Samples

Language translation can be like a lover, ugly and faithful or beautiful and not. -- unattributed

Below are links to two samples of my work. These two articles were downloaded at random from the web. Please note when reviewing these samples that I translated them with the goal of maximizing comprehension, and they are not quite publication quality. The web page titles, etc. were intentionally left in the source language.

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Description	Korean	English
Information Technology news from Yahoo! Korea	inews24.html	inews24_eng.html
Korea Institute for Defense Analyses article from Korean Ministry of National Defense site	mnd_k.html	mnd_e.html

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