Bilingual packets: where won figures drift

Many organizations in Seoul circulate budget planning applications with a Korean primary form and an English briefing annex for mixed-language panels. The risk is not translation style; it is arithmetic drift.

Rounding and unit labels

One version may show thousands of won; another may show millions. Without a clear unit line, a reader sees two different requests. We ask clients to lock a single unit convention and to copy totals rather than retype them.

Term alignment

Cost-code names should match across languages or carry a glossary. A “contracted service” in English that maps to two Korean categories will spawn clarifying questions that consume meeting time.

Audit practice

In full application audits we reconcile bilingual totals early. Discrepancies found on day one are cheaper than discrepancies found in committee.