The words a refugee guide cannot simplify away

A simpler word is not always a more useful one. Refugee News’ writing guide tells editors to retain official document and institution names so readers can recognise them on forms or find them online. An explanation can sit beside the unfamiliar term.[2]

A field report published on 28 October follows the AI work behind this multilingual service for refugees in South Korea. Nari Yoo and Youngah Kim, executive director of its operator Migration to Asia Peace, describe rewriting Korean articles, adding explanations and checking changing official information before translation into seven languages.[1]

Across 83 usable before-and-after article pairs, sentences became shorter in 70. Vocabulary changed comparatively little: the system split sentences and supplied explanations. The researchers did not measure whether readers understood the resulting translations better or acted on them.[1]

Updating facts required another kind of attention. In a separate review of the later live catalogue, a staff member found 34 factual defects across 28 of 233 Korean articles, including stale figures and confused legal categories. The paper reports that all 34 were corrected. This was the organisation’s own review.[1]

Current editorial rules make precise meaning concrete. In the context of an immigration detention centre, the Korean term boho must be rendered as detention, not care or protection. Visa codes stay intact, and legally different residence categories remain distinct.[3]

The current About page describes translation reviewers in each language. For new articles in designated high-risk categories, including asylum and health, the service publishes only reviewed translations; others may appear first with an AI-translation label. This extends beyond the source-language review in the field report.[4][1]

Its translation policy says to fix mistakes in the original. A correction must travel with the information, beyond a single language.[3]

Report an error or suggest a correction