Park Sun-tae, Honorary Professor, National University of Trujillo, Peru (Latin America expert, Certified Foreign-Language Translation Administrative Agent)
No matter how strong a Korean company's technology or price competitiveness is, if that value cannot be conveyed accurately to a foreign contracting agency, it will not be properly evaluated. In international bidding, translation is not a simple language service — it is core work that can determine bid eligibility, technical evaluation, contractual liability, and ultimately the award itself.
For many years, in diplomacy and international business, I have worked with treaty texts and overseas bid documents. In diplomatic agreements, negotiators sometimes spend a long time to change a single word, a comma, or a clause number, because a small difference in wording can change the scope of a state's or a company's obligations.
The same applies to international bidding documents. On one occasion, at a Korean company's request, I persuaded a local agency to extend a bid submission deadline — no small task. The company worked through the night to prepare its proposal and submitted it, but the response from the local contracting agency's staff was unexpected.
"We honestly can't understand what this is trying to say." It wasn't that the company lacked the technology. The content of the proposal simply hadn't come through correctly in translation. It was a case where translation failure became a failure of corporate competitiveness.
Most Latin American countries speak Spanish, but legal, administrative, procurement, and technical terminology differs from country to country. A term familiar in Mexico may carry a different meaning to a contracting agency in Colombia or Peru. Being fluent in Spanish alone doesn't guarantee accurate handling of bid documents across every Latin American country.
A bigger problem is that the translation process is broken into many disconnected stages. A request for proposals (RFP) written in the local language is translated into Korean, and the Korean company drafts its Korean-language proposal based on that translation. The lengthy proposal is then split among multiple people and translated back into the local language. Along the way, key concepts used by the contracting agency get rendered into Korean-style expressions, then translated back into the local language as yet another term. Individual sentences may read naturally, but across the whole document the same technology or system ends up described with inconsistent terminology.
Having multiple translators isn't itself the problem. What matters is whether there is an overall lead who understands the entire project and the contracting agency's requirements. An international bid document is one interconnected system — technical proposal, pricing, contract terms, company track record, personnel qualifications and experience, and the project execution plan. It requires a glossary, verification of figures and units, cross-checking between clauses, and comparison of the final proposal against the original RFP.
Translating personnel experience is especially sensitive. "Participated in related work" and "was responsible for" or "led" that field are entirely different claims. In a bid that awards different scores for five versus ten years of experience in a given field, that difference can change the outcome. A translator's job is not to compensate for a company's shortfalls or dress them up more favorably — it is to convey verified facts accurately so the contracting agency isn't misled.
A similar problem arises with official document translation. Many people assume that once a translation carries a notarization stamp, the entire translated content must be accurate. But certification of the translation, apostille, and consular authentication are distinct from the substantive accuracy of the translation itself. A formal certification process may be required, but it doesn't mean someone who understands the foreign language and the specialist field actually reviewed the full source and target texts.
Other countries operate certified-translator systems. Spain has sworn translators (traductores jurados); Peru has publicly sworn translators; Colombia has official translators; Mexico has court-registered expert translators (peritos traductores). Names and operating methods differ, but they share one thing in common: institutionally clarifying a translator's qualifications and responsibility.
Korea also has a national professional qualification — the Foreign-Language Translation Administrative Agent. A Foreign-Language Translation Administrative Agent can certify that a document they personally translated matches the original. Yet even domestically this system's role isn't well known, and abroad, its very existence is often unknown. As a result, Korean companies can faithfully translate documents through a domestic professional only to have to commission an official translation locally all over again. In countries where very few local official translators handle Korean, work concentrates on a handful of people, and bid preparation can be delayed by that translator's schedule.
The government and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs should not leave this as a burden for individual companies to bear alone. They need to inform partner countries of the legal basis and administration of the Foreign-Language Translation Administrative Agent system, and — starting with rare languages — negotiate joint verification with local official translators, simplified registration procedures, and limited mutual recognition. Overseas missions should also systematically map local official translators' languages, specialties, and availability, and make that information available to companies.
Future translation talent must also be prepared. Until now, it has mainly been Koreans who learned a foreign language and the local system to work as professional translators. But a growing number of international students are now studying engineering, medicine, law, administration, and economics at Korean universities. If they return home and obtain local certified-translator credentials, they could become vital international talent who understand both Korea's and their home country's systems and industries.
Translation is not simply the mechanical work of rewording sentences. It is the foundation connecting the languages and institutions, companies and administrations, of different countries. To raise our companies' overseas competitiveness, we must view the certified-translation system not as a formal paperwork procedure but as infrastructure for international trade and economic diplomacy.
It is time to first clarify, domestically, the expertise and responsibility of the Foreign-Language Translation Administrative Agent, and to build institutional channels for cooperation with official translators abroad. Proper translation is not a cost — it is an investment that protects the trust of our companies and our nation.
Author's background: Latin America expert (former diplomat, Honorary Professor at the National University of Trujillo, Peru); Certified Spanish Foreign-Language Translation Administrative Agent; CEO, SEBA Global Administrative Support Center
Source: Ajunews, 2026-07-27. Original (Korean): https://www.ajunews.com/view/20260727144337467
