Meet Jenny — Translator at Coupang

Coupang's Interpretation & Translation organization is divided into Interpretation and Translation teams. Coupang has a granular organizational structure and a job-specific onboarding system that helps new joiners grow into experts in interpretation and translation. It is said that even among those who have the same major of interpretation/translation, the appeal of interpretation and translation varies from person to person, depending on a person’s work style and what makes them feel fulfilled.      

In this interview, we meet with Jenny, a Senior Translator of Global Operations Interpreters & Translators (GOI) team who joined the company in 2017 and has been working at Coupang for about seven years.  

Hello Jenny, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?   

Hello, my name is Jenny, and I work as a Senior Translator at GOI. I joined Coupang in 2017 and have been here for 7 years now. My team provides translation services to the Global Operations Tech team, which is in charge of building systems that drive the overall process and workflow of Coupang's fulfillment and transportation systems, as well as the SCM Systems team, which is in charge of system development and automation of Coupang’s Supply Chain Management system. When I first joined Coupang, my team was structured in a way all the interpreters and translators form a single unit, instead of there being a separate team for the translators, but in 2020, a translation team was organized, allowing us to work more methodically under a further specialized functional unit.  

What inspired you to apply for a job at Coupang right out of graduate school?   

I was lucky enough to get a chance to work as a short-term freelancer at Coupang right after graduating. It was only for a month, but I remember thinking how fascinating it would be to work for a company like this. What I found most attractive was that there was an interpretation and translation team for each domain, providing a structure wherein junior and senior members of the team can communicate openly, share pain points with one another, and grow together as a team.  

At the end of my freelance contract, the company thankfully offered me to take the test for a full-time position, and I said yes without any second thoughts, as even at that time, Coupang was the most-desired employer among graduates pursuing a career in translation. So, I took the test and joined Coupang.  

You studied both interpretation and translation in graduate school, why did you decide to pursue a career as a full-time translator?  

I get this question a lot, but the answer is simple. I chose the job that I found more attractive. Loving your job matters as it allows you to stick it out for the long term and motivates you to do better. I feel a huge sense of accomplishment when I’m happy with my translation outcome, and I also love the delicate process of translating the source text into the most appropriate target language while making sure I’m preserving the writer's intention.  

I’ve also had opportunities to interpret before, but when I saw myself feeling more satisfied with my translation work than my interpretation performance, I was strongly convinced that pursuing a career at which I’d like to excel and maximizing my potential in that chosen field is what's best for me. This is how I came to pursue a career in translation.    

For you, what are some differences between interpretation and translation?     

While interpretation takes place on the spot during a live scenario, translation happens over a period of time, which is why I think more intervention is required during the translation process. At times when interpreting, a few words can be enough to convey a complicated message as there are external factors involved in the communication process other than the spoken message itself such as the situation, atmosphere, and context in which the conversation is happening, while for translation, the only medium through which to communicate is the written text itself, and therefore, messages need to be conveyed more explicitly and specifically.  

Taking Korean as an example, the object and subject of an action, especially the first-person subject, are often omitted during communication, so translators often have to directly intervene to help readers understand the message by adding back the omitted sentences or words. We therefore need to always pay close attention to stakeholder relationships, stay on top of new projects happening as well as how they’re progressing and always work hard to build up the domain knowledge we can pull from when needed.   

Also, there is an essential process in translation that can’t go unmentioned, which is research. Unlike interpretation, which is carried out immediately after the speaker starts talking, translation gives us a little more time to refine the final outcome. To use cooking as a metaphor, it gives us the chance to taste the food in its making to help add the right amount of seasoning or adjust the heat. As this process in cooking helps bring out the flavor of the dish, research does the same trick with translation. It is the process of acquiring more background knowledge to find the most appropriate expressions in the target language, thereby improving the overall quality of the translation. I go through this process in most cases, whether by skimming through external sources or carefully reading team pages that summarize ongoing projects or provide domain-specific guidelines. If interpretation requires quick thinking, translation requires consistency and patience to continue this process without getting tired.  

I know that interpreters use a system called CouIST for scheduling, but I'm curious about the work process on the translation side as well.  
  
 We use an enterprise collaboration tool. Simply put, it is a shared version of your "To-Do List" managed at the team level. Translation requests received via email are posted on the team’s board for progress management. It's a convenient tool which provides granular visibility into your team’s work via a Kanban board with the “To-do”, "Doing”, and “Done” columns to indicate progress and task status.   

However, since it is an external tool, we always wished we could use features that are perfectly customized to our needs, and under the recognition that a tool that accurately reflects the needs of the translation team, such as CouIST, is needed, we are currently developing an in-house tool. With the use of this tool, we expect to be able to eliminate the current hurdles along the pre- and post-translation process and further increase work efficiency.  

While there are more and more AI tools on the market, Coupang continues to hire translators. What are the qualities that you think machine translation can't replace?  

Despite the fact that translation is always being mentioned among jobs most likely to be replaced by AI, I think Coupang continues to hire translators because the company knows the subtle but substantial difference between AI and human translation and the value that can be achieved through that difference.   

Let me share some concrete examples I came across at work that reveal the limitations of AI. The Korean words “동 호수” pertaining to Apartment building and unit number are mentioned quite often when explaining the delivery process, and they are translated into "East Lake information" by a machine translation software. In similar fashion, the "read rate" of a barcode scanner is translated by machines into "가독성 (readability rate)" instead of "인식률 (recognition rate)", when the former is a measure of how easy a piece of text is to read, while the latter is the rate at which an input pattern is correctly recognized. As can be seen from these examples, there are clear limitations to what AI can currently do.  

Also, I don’t think translation is simply the process of converting one language into another, word-for-word. Think about how much the same original text can differ in the source text depending on who translates it. At times, paraphrasing is necessary, and reworking the translation to make sure it is appropriate for the context and situation is also necessary so that it doesn’t feel stilted and clunky to the reader. Language contains subtle nuances, so sophisticated skills are needed to convey them without omission. And it is also very important to appropriately transfer the exact weight carried by the source text into the target text. 

Especially, in-house translators feel a tremendous sense of responsibility because we know for ourselves that we have to be able to translate any in-house written content more accurately than anyone or any machine for that matter based on our accumulated domain knowledge. I think that skilled translators with painstaking diligence and a strong sense of responsibility for their translation output cannot be replaced by machines.  

You started as a junior translator and now you're a senior translator, so I'm sure you have a unique perspective.  

You’re right. When I was a junior, I was pretty much occupied “functioning” as a translator and honestly couldn’t pay sizeable attention to the team’s administrative work or projects that the senior translators then were managing. However, even as a junior, I tried to take a lot of interest in what goes around while taking a “Company-wide perspective”, thinking that they would eventually be mine to take on in my senior years to come. Since that’s when you can learn a lot of different skills, I think it’s important for juniors to work hard each day to cultivate a skill set that will serve you well in the future.    

When in a senior role, I think it is important that you learn how to enjoy what you do without feeling too much of a burden. These days, I try to work with the mindset that I should “keep moving forward, even if the journey is tough as we learn and grow by doing” and that it’s important to “always think about maximizing one’s potential, instead of simply completing a work that has been given".  

Thank you so much for joining us today. Any final thoughts you'd like to share?  

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to give careful thought to what I do once again. I was prompted to think back on the concerns I had when I first joined the company and during my junior years, and it also helped me set up the path I should take as a senior translator.   

While preparing for this interview, I realized how much I had grown with Coupang without me knowing. I also felt proud of myself for choosing translation as my career and walking down this path for 7 years now, and I plan to keep striving as I look forward to adding more years to this career I’ve chosen.