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How to Read Korean Novels Legally in English and Support Authors

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How to Read Korean Novels Legally in English and Support Authors

If you're a fan of Korean novels but feel daunted by the translation process, welcome to the club. In a world with bad machine translation (MTL) and hard-to-get content, going through official sources ensures that you can always get the raws and support the author along the process.

Here's how to get started. (and stick till the end to find out how to get high quality translations of Korean novels)

Find an official Korean novel site

Popular ones include:

  • Bomtoon
  • Kakao
  • Ridibooks
  • Novelpia

Get verified and buy credits

We have made detailed guides about how to get verified and purchase novels on most official Korean novel platforms:

Bomtoon

Kakao

Ridibooks

Novelpia

Try Google Translate

Once you have access to the chapters, the next hurdle is the language barrier. Given that not every chapter comes in an official English translation, you might have to rely on tools like Google Translate to bridge the gap.

You can do this directly in your Chrome browser. However, this might not work for every site, or if it does work the translations might be bad.

Quality not good enough? - Try ChatGPT

If you want to try ChatGPT, you can copy paste those translations directly into ChatGPT. However, there are a few things to consider:

  1. ChatGPT will not translate explicit chapters due to content filters
  2. There is a length limit - as chapters get longer the quality starts to reduce significantly.

Text not detected? - Use Google Docs

Strap in, as this is a tedious process.

  • • Screenshot Every Page: Instead of wasting time re-copying text, take screenshots of every page you wish to translate.
  • • Paste in Google Docs. Google Docs has built in OCR features that allow you to translate the pasted text.
  • • Finally, copy the cleaned-up text back into Google Translate and wait for your "translated" version. Don't expect a masterpiece—this is a makeshift solution that often demands multiple revisions.

Try OpenNovel!

on-dash

If you find this too annoying - try OpenNovel.

With OpenNovel's Chrome extension, you can translate chapters directly from official websites.

We translate the novel using state of the art AI models like ChatGPT, Gemini and DeepSeek that have been fine-tuned for novel translations.

  • • You can keep characters and terms consistent (as well as genders)
  • • You can bypass the content filter
  • • You can have unlimited length for every chapter (no more copy and pasting).

With this, you can skip the trouble and get amazing quality while supporting the authors that you love.

Conclusion

Reading Korean novels legally in English is a path of mixed rewards. On one hand, the official platforms and direct support help sustain the vibrant world of Korean novels - but the verification and buying process might scare some away.

But once you get past that initial hurdle, you don't have to deal with unofficial and pirated sites constantly being taken down and you always have access to the original raws - for life.