What are some common mistakes? and pls give some advice as to how you can fix them? For example, is translating word by word helpful or more troublesome? Translating idoms and all.
Don't ever translate word for word, this is the main flaw with machine translations, they do that without looking at the context, leading to some really bad translations (Fucked Until Exploded Duck for lunch anyone?). The oriental languages, a lot more than English, are contextual languages, the same word in a different situation can have a different meaning. It is also annoyingly idiomatic and full of slang so a lot of experience with using that language in life is required to make sense of a lot of that slang. In short, after you finish translating, check your work to see if it makes sense. If it does not, you got a translator error somewhere. https://static.boredpanda.com/blog/...ls/funny-chinese-sign-translation-fails-1.jpg This is a classic example of "right translation for words, wrong context".
I would've given some tips if it was CN to ENG but I've got 0 experience with Korean MTL. 100% agree with reading the output though, like just take a second and read and see if it actually makes sense. And that's not even just limited to MTL, it's way too often that I see something that's clearly wrong and can even often tell from the translation what the original RAW would've been. Another general tip though is that after you start paying attention, you'll become familiar with frequent translation mistakes and know what to look out for and how to fix it.
As mentioned above, word by word are the worst move. Context is the most important especially for novels. I also learnt this while doing it myself, that too faithful to the original "word by word" isn't really right. I'm still learning to improve it. I suggest you have to know at least the basic to some extent if you choose to MTLing. Idioms and slangs are annoying, especially when the term or phrase have double meanings. When MTLing, you'll find some weird part that doesn't flow well. You should check which part from the source is the error and search it up. You'll found some alternative meanings for terms or explanations for idioms. For my case, I searched and learnt a lot of sources about slangs and idioms. I also organize my own dictionary for consistency along with specific jargons(eg. crank in, AD, coordi) that can't really be found in dictionary and have to do a separate search to find the English equivalent or just keep it as it is while putting a footnote. Slangs(mostly internet terms), if you know the basic and some gaps, you'll find that many slangs have similar pattern. Slangs here include abbreviations. Usually, if there's no explanation then that abbreviation is common and you can search it while if it's a new made up words then there'll be explanations. One other problem is the involvement of hanja. Pure Korean words and Chinese derived words is a hassle to explain. Anyway, you'll often face this if what you want to translate is historical or martial arts. What can I advice is open the hanja dictionary or just translate the hanja with CN to ENG. I only handle novels with modern background so I'm not well versed in this. When I met one, I look up each hanja word and guess the meaning. Ah, learning some common hanja is pretty helpful too.