The Drift Caused by Stepping-Stone Translation
When the Dream Team publishes one article in four languages, we first used this order: translate Korean into English, then translate that English into Traditional and Simplified Chinese. English as a stepping stone looked convenient. But during review, the Chinese sentences kept differing from the original in subtle ways.
A Small Experiment
We took the same ten Korean sentences and translated them two ways.
• A: Korean → English → Chinese
• B: Korean → Chinese (straight from the source)
Then we counted the sentences whose meaning no longer matched the Korean. A had four out of ten. B had one. The drifting sentences usually followed one pattern: a soft phrase like 「let me take a look」 turned stiff as 「I will check」 in English, and then became an even firmer promise in Chinese.
How to Copy This
1. Keep exactly one master copy, always in Korean.
2. Request each language separately from the master. Do not pass through English.
3. Attach this one line to every request.
Keep the tone and the strength of any commitment exactly as in the original. If you are not sure, do not guess. Mark it as [needs check].
4. Do not copy Traditional into Simplified or the reverse. Request each one on its own.
5. At the end, have the AI read each translation back into Korean (back-translation) and compare it side by side with the original.
Wrap-Up
Every extra translation step shaves off another layer of nuance. We got a little slower, but the number of fixes during review dropped noticeably. If you run a small non-developer team, start with one simple rule before any complex tool: 「one master copy, and every translation comes straight from it」.