Try uploading screenshots of non-sensitive adoption documents in Korean and / or Hanja to Google Gemini for translation.

Please be sure to FULLY REDACT SENSITIVE INFORMATION BEFORE uploading any of your documents to ANY AI program! U.S. Adoptees should be sure to redact their A Number (Alien Number) and any other sensitive information such as names, addresses, phone numbers, etc. We do not suggest naming the documents you upload with your first and last name!

We recently tried translating some Hanja text using our usual method of using a combination of Google Lens and ChatGPT, which we have provided a tutorial for here:

Google Lens + ChatGPT Translation Tutorial

ChatGPT for Korean Text Translation

However, there may be an even better method for attempting to translate Hangul, or in particluar — HANJA (an older form of Korean which is a mixture of Chinese and Korean) text on documents.

Most automatic translators have a much harder time translating Hanja (older Korean) than Hangul (modern Korean).

We tried uploading a screenshot of a document containing HANJA to Google Gemini and had much better results than with our usual method of using a combination of Google Lens and ChatGPT:

Try uploading your documents or screenshots of them in part or in whole — making sure that any sensitive information is redacted — to Google Gemini. Then ask Google Gemini to translate them.

Please note — there are NO privacy safeguards for ANYTHING which you upload to ANY AI program of any kind. So you do this at your own privacy risk, for which we take NO RESPONSIBILITY.

Please NEVER upload sensitive information such as your U.S. Alien (A) Number or other sensitive data to AI programs.

If you are a U.S. Korean Adoptee, you should be ESPECIALLY CAREFUL right now about uploading any private, sensitive documents to ANY AI program!

Be sure to COMPLETELY REDACT / BLACK or WHITE OUT information which you do NOT want uploaded to an AI program BEFORE you upload your document/s!

However, for Korean and Hanja documents which you cannot read, or which do not contain sensitive information, try a variety of AI programs, such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and DeepL to see if you can get a good translation of your documents through these methods. You are going to get different translations depending on the AI program you use. Even if you ask multiple live Korean translators, you are going to get multiple different translations — so just bear all this in mind.

*We always STRONGLY ADVISE you to get a LIVE translation by a REAL translator of any IMPORTANT information related to birth family search, such as birth parent and sibling names, addresses, city names, etc. Please do not waste years of time chasing down rabbit holes based on faulty translations!

However, AI programs are great for getting the overall GIST of a document containing Korean / Hanja text.

Happy translating!