Free Online Tools + Tips For Searchers
Free Online Tools + Tips For Searchers
The tips are applicable to Korean Adoptees adopted through ANY Korean Adoption Agency.
Simplify your search process by using these free online tools + tips:
Free Online Tools:
Time Zone Converter – Time Difference Calculator:
https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html
Useful for coordinating those international Zoom or phone calls, or knowing what time it’s best to contact someone in Korea (or anywhere in the world).
Simply add two or more different cities to easily figure out what the time difference is between different cities in the country or world.
Days Calculator: Days Between Two Dates:
https://www.timeanddate.com/date/duration.html
Useful for calculating the number of days between dates in your documents. How many days was it between when you were Relinquished to when you arrived in your Western country of adoption? Etc.
Free Online Tools for Korean / English / Any Other Language Translation:
ChatGPT: https://chat.openai.com/
For more info on how to use ChatGPT for Korean and Hanja translation please see:
ChatGPT does not yet have voice translation, but works the best for text translation of all current online translators.
Papago: https://papago.naver.com/
Papago does an ok job for simple text translation in Korean, but overall garbles the translation for more complex text.
The main benefit of Papapo is its voice translation feature. This only works for very simple words and phrases. Be sure to turn on the setting for “honorifics” or you may come across as rude in Korean!
Google Lens: https://lens.google/
Google Lens is best for picking up text that you can’t simply copy/paste from a source. For example, text on a document that has been photographed or scanned. You can use Google Lens to pick up such text, then copy/paste that text to ChatGPT for a better translation that Google Translate can currently provide.
Google Translate: https://translate.google.com/
Google Translate is good in a pinch, but like Papago, has more garbled translation than does ChatGPT.
Google Translate also has a voice translate feature.
Tips for Efficient Online Searching:
Search tip: Use Google and search any site on the web more efficiently, such as the Paperslip site (below) by removing the http://www. and typing in Google’s search bar:
site:paperslip.org + “KSS address”
This works with any website, and you can substitute “KSS address” with any search term, with or without "quotes”
General Tip for Online Searching for KOREAN place / people names spelled in ENGLISH:
Search tip: Many Korean Adoptees will naturally start out searching for things online in ENGLISH. However - pro-tip: Koreans in Korea speak and write in KOREAN. Hello! So when you are searching for a name that you know in English - for example, an Orphanage name that is spelled in English as “Sun Wah Orphanage” - try FIRST translating this to KOREAN (preferably through ChatGPT, which is far more accurate than Google Translate or Papago) - and THEN searching BOTH Google AND NAVER (Korea’s top search engine) for the KOREAN term. Ya know? *Please NOTE: You have to be careful as ANY automatic translator (ChatGPT, Google Translate, Google Lens, Papago) are NOT going to be perfect. So you could end up chasing down some bad rabbit holes on bad data. But for recreational search purposes, give this a try. For SERIOUS searches - hire yourself a REAL, LIVE TRANSLATOR.