Why Google Translate Gets Korean and Japanese Wrong: 7 Real Examples
Google Translate scored 2.85 out of 5 on Korean to Japanese and 3.33 on Japanese to Korean in our blind test on 2026-10-14. Proxylang scored 4.35 and 4.60, DeepL 4.30 and 4.60. Most of Google's errors came from Korean words matched to the wrong Chinese characters, and from idioms translated word by word. Because the wrong word is still a real Japanese word, a Korean company that does not read Japanese cannot see the error on its own site.
Korean words read as the wrong kanji
A large share of Korean words come from Chinese characters, and Japanese writes the same characters as kanji. A Korean word can sound like several character words. Pick the wrong one and the Japanese looks fine but means something else.
| Korean source | Google Translate | Proxylang |
|---|---|---|
| 초인종 (doorbell) | 超人種 ("superhuman race") | ドアベル (doorbell) |
| 보안회사 (security company) | 保障会社 (guarantee company) | セキュリティ会社 (security company) |
| 혈장 흐름(plasma flow), about stars | 血漿流 (blood plasma flow) | プラズマ流 (plasma flow) |
The third one is a good test of context. The Korean word 혈장 does mean blood plasma, but the sentence is about stars and even adds "plasma flow" in English. Proxylang used that context. Google kept the medical meaning.
Idioms translated word by word
Korean set phrases do not survive a word-by-word swap into Japanese.
| Korean source | Google Translate | Proxylang |
|---|---|---|
| 난관에 봉착했다 (ran into trouble) | 難関に封じ込んだ ("sealed into a hard barrier", not real Japanese) | 困難に直面しました (faced difficulties) |
| 합의를 보았다 (settled the lawsuit) | 合意を見た ("saw an agreement") | 和解に至った (reached a settlement) |
A Japanese reader understands 合意を見た with effort. 難関に封じ込んだ reads as a broken sentence.
Names spelled out instead of translated
Korean has its own names for foreign institutions. The Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel Prize in Literature, is 스웨덴 한림원 in Korean.
- Google Translate: ハンリムウォン, the Korean sound spelled out in katakana. No Japanese reader will know what that is.
- DeepL: スウェーデン王立科学アカデミー, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. A real institution, but the wrong one: it awards the physics and chemistry prizes.
- Proxylang: スウェーデン・アカデミー, the correct name.
Japanese to Korean: meaning flipped, ending cut off
The same Japanese sentence about the Nobel committee came back from Google with two errors. The source says the committee could not reach Bob Dylan directly. Google wrote 연락을 취하지 않았기 때문에, "because it did not contact him", which blames the committee. Then the Korean stops at 연락을 취할 것을 주장. ("insisted on contacting"), with no verb ending, so the sentence is unfinished and says the opposite of the source.
Proxylang wrote 직접 연락을 취할 수 없었기 때문에 그와 연락하는 것을 포기했다고 공식 발표했습니다: it could not reach him directly, so it gave up and announced that publicly. DeepL got this one right as well.
English to Korean: one word reverses the claim
This one is English to Korean, and it shows how small the error can be. The source says the activity of stars is driven by their brightness, their rotation, "and nothing else".
- Google Translate: 그리고 그 외의 다른 어떤 요인에 의해서도 좌우된다, "and is also driven by any other factor". The opposite claim.
- Proxylang: 오직 광도와 자전에 의해서만 결정된다, "decided only by luminosity and rotation".
- DeepL: 광도와 자전 속도에 의해서만 좌우되며, 그 외의 요인은 없다, also correct.
What this means for a Korean or Japanese website
These errors look like normal text to anyone who does not read the target language. That makes them worse than visible gibberish: they go live and stay live.
Four steps lower the risk:
- Use a tool that translates Korean and Japanese directly with sentence context, not one word at a time. In this test Proxylang and DeepL were level on these pairs, and Google was far behind.
- Put company names, product names and fixed terms in a glossary, so they come out the same on every page.
- Ask one native speaker to read your top five pages. With Proxylang's Live Editor they click any translated sentence on the live site to fix it.
- Watch links and bold text, which move when Korean and Japanese reorder a sentence. See how links and bold text survive translation.
Frequently asked questions
Does Google Translate go through English for Korean to Japanese?
Google does not publish how it routes each pair. What we can measure is the output: on our 40 Korean to Japanese test sentences, Google scored 2.85 out of 5, against 4.35 for Proxylang and 4.30 for DeepL.
Is DeepL safe for Korean and Japanese?
DeepL scored level with Proxylang on both directions between Korean and Japanese in our test. It still made fact errors, such as naming the wrong Swedish academy, so a native check of key pages is worth it with any tool.
How was this tested?
Forty sentences per pair from the FLORES-200 public test set, translated by each system on 2026-10-14 and scored 1 to 5 by a separate AI judge that did not know which system wrote which translation.
Sources
- FLORES-200 test set: github.com
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