Translation troubles

I got back a few days ago from a month-long trip to (mainland) France, the UK and Iceland (I’ll be blogging about the Icelandic language soon), and I wanted to share some surprising or humorous translation errors I came across while travelling.

First of all, when we dropped our hire car off at Edinburgh airport on our way to Iceland we came across this surprising sign:

The ‘keys’ have of course been translated into the other languages using the word for computer keys and not car keys. Thankfully the context and the illustration help you understand what is meant.

Also in Edinburgh we came across the following sign when leaving a car-park:

I don’t speak German, Italian or Spanish so can’t vouch for the other languages, but in French a new word, renez, has been created.

While we were in the UK the Korean flag scandal happened, and two days later a chain of British opticians capitalised on it with the following newspaper advertisement:

Although I lived for three years in South Korea my Korean isn’t fluent enough to be sure when there’s a mistake, however a Korean friend confirmed that while the Korean itself is correct, ‘Specsavers’ should be at the beginning and not the end of the sentence. Presumably the advertisers wanted the Korean to look like the equivalent English sentence (an advertising slogan which is well-known in the UK): “They should have gone to Specsavers”.

The day after my return to Reunion Island I went to a local restaurant with a friend who was passing through. This particular restaurant is one of the few in Saint Denis that’s taken the trouble to translate its menu into English, however they insist on using internet translation and unfortunately that gives the following results:

For those that don’t speak French the Crotin [sic] de Chèvre Chaud should be ‘Warm Goat’s Cheese’ in English and not ‘dung’!

Another example from the same menu:

Here Souris [d'agneau] (knuckle of lamb) has been translated literally as ‘mouse’. Things have improved however, as a few years ago filet was translated thoughout as ‘net’ instead of ‘fillet’, and cabot de fond (a type of fish) was translated as ‘dog bottom’!

Have you seen any translations that have made you laugh out loud recently?

P.S. By the way, the level of English in Iceland was amazingly good – I virtually never saw (or even heard) any mistakes in English. 

Adventures on a Faraway Island

Last week I was invited by the Endless Possibilities Talks (EPT) team (Al Navas, Gerda Prato-Espejo and Esther Navarro-Hall) to talk about my personal journey, that is say the story of how I came to end up living and working as a translator on this small island in the Indian Ocean that is Reunion Island. We also talked about my three years spent living in South Korea, and some of my travels. CGVJ3AF7AJRS.

If you’re a translator or interpreter you may already have heard of the EPT initiative. Esther, Gerda and Al reside in the US and all work as Spanish interpreters, mainly in the courts; Esther also speaks French and is an Adjunct Professor at the Monterey Institute of International Studies and a trainer and consultant. At the beginning of this year they started a series of talks about the profession of Interpreting and Translating, using the Google Hangout on Air format. Talks are broadcast on average once a week (sometimes more), and generally include guests from the four corners of the globe. They can be watched live on Google+, or afterwards on You Tube. Previous talks have covered localisation, blogging, and technology options for interpreting, to name just a few subjects.

To find out more about EPT and their talks you can visit their Google+ page and/or their blog. You can also follow them on Twitter.

With warm thanks to Gerda, Esther and Al for allowing me this wonderful opportunity to be part of their fascinating EPT adventure, and here’s looking forward to many more talks!

Interview with a Lexicographer

Julie Moore is a freelance lexicographer based in the UK. After an early career as an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teacher, working in Greece and the Czech Republic, she became involved in ELT (English Language Teaching) publishing, and much of her work has been in the area of ELT dictionaries. She has written for various ELT projects, as well as editing and reviewing ELT material, and she also teaches part-time EAP (English for Academic Purposes) courses at a University.

Please tell us a little bit about yourself

I live in Bristol in South West England.  I work from home in a little mezzanine office at the top of the house.

Please tell us about your job

I have a bit of a “portfolio career” – I work on all kinds of English Language Teaching (ELT) materials; dictionaries, vocabulary books, coursebooks. I wear a variety of different hats; lexicographer, writer, editor and corpus researcher, oh yes, and occasional teacher at Bristol University.

For how long and what made you become freelance?

Yes, I’ve been freelance since 2000.  My initial decision to go it alone was prompted by health issues. I suffer from fairly severe RSI [Repetitive Strain Injury] which makes it difficult to be sat at a desk 9-5.  As a freelancer, I can organise my working day so I work in short bursts (60-90 mins) and take lots of breaks.  I also have more control over my work set-up – special mouse, voice recognition software, etc.

Who do you work for?

I work for all the major ELT publishers (CUP, OUP, Macmillan, Collins, etc.).

How did you become a lexicographer, and how long have you been one for?

After several years as an EFL teacher, I realised I loved explaining language, especially vocabulary, but didn’t much like the teaching lifestyle.  So I did an MA in Special Applications of Linguistics at the University of Birmingham and as part of that I specialised in corpus linguistics and lexicography.  When I completed my Masters in 1998, I was lucky enough to get a job as an in-house lexicographer at Cambridge University Press, working on their, then new, Cambridge Learner’s Dictionary.

What are the advantages and disadvantages linked to your job?

Freelancing advantage: The biggest advantage to being a freelancer is the flexibility it gives you, both in terms of the way you work and the variety of projects you can take on.

Lexicography advantage: What’s not to like about “playing with words” all day?!

Freelancing disadvantage: One of the downsides is trying to keep a steady flow of work, it inevitably comes in peaks and troughs.  For me, the busy patches can be a struggle physically and of course, when things get quiet, you always worry, even though after 12 years freelancing, I know that something else is always going to come along. Lexicography projects are actually quite good for workflow compared to other writing, because they usually provide nice regular hours often over a period of months.

Lexicography disadvantage: I’ve been moving away from pure lexicography a bit in recent years partly because it’s become more automated and the software used to compile dictionaries has become much less RSI-friendly. You used to do a variety of different actions (paging up and down to read corpus lines, scribbling handwritten notes, typing in definitions and examples), now it’s all about ticking boxes and it’s got very mouse-heavy.

Can you describe a typical day?

Because of my health, I have to be quite disciplined about my working hours.  I get up at 8 and I’m usually at my desk by about 9. I spend a bit of time checking emails … and Facebook and Twitter! Then I usually do a couple of hours’ work in the morning. I often go for a swim at the local pool late morning, to relax and stretch out. Afternoons usually involve two working stints of 1-2 hours each with a break mid-afternoon to nip round to the shops or, in the summer, do a bit of gardening on my tiny roof terrace.

Are you part of an association or group of lexicographers? 

No, but I am a member of IATEFL (association for teachers of English).

Any advice to give to someone who’d like to become a lexicographer (or just a freelancer)?

Sadly, I think it’s more difficult to get into ELT lexicography nowadays because most of the big dictionary publishers only employ a handful of in-house editors, then use freelance lexicographers. I don’t think you’d get the kind of in-house job and valuable training I benefited from now.

On freelancing more generally, my top tip would be networking and lots of it. Most of my work has come through contacts.  I find conferences and other events are great opportunities to meet the people who matter (the ones who work for publishers!).  You don’t have to do a hard sell, just talking about what you’re interested in and sounding enthusiastic about your work goes a long way.  If you end a conversation by giving out a business card, you never know what might come of it.

Do you have a preferred moment of the day?

I think I’m most productive in the morning, but I really enjoy my mid-afternoon cup of tea, especially in the summer when I can enjoy it out on my roof terrace.

Do you use social media much? For work or pleasure?

I’ve been on Facebook for a few years, but it’s only in the past year that I’ve started using it for work. From a work perspective, it’s definitely expanded that all-important network of contacts and has even led directly to some concrete work. I started using Twitter this year, purely for work. After an initial flurry, I’m now checking it a bit less frequently, but I still think it’s a useful way of keeping in touch with the latest trends and ideas in ELT.

What is your favourite word?

If I had to pick one, I guess it would be “soporific”.  I came across it as a young child reading Beatrix Potter’s “The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies”.  I loved the feel of it in my mouth and I think, perhaps, it marked the start of my love affair with words. I also have a bit of a penchant for words beginning “squ …”.

What is your least favourite word?

I generally try very hard not to be a language pedant.  I can’t help but notice language ‘errors’ when I see them, but I try not to take a ‘moral’ stand unless it’s in a context where someone should really  know better. One thing that bugs me every time though is the incorrect usage of ‘everyday’ instead of ‘every day’.

As a lexicographer, do you have to know lots of words?

When I tell people what I do, this is one of the most common reactions (along with comments about being good at Scrabble!), but in fact, although I like language, I wouldn’t say I have a particularly wide vocabulary.  Most learner’s dictionaries focus on the most frequent words in the language anyway and when I’ve worked on higher level and native-speaker dictionaries, you always use corpus data. Thankfully, lexicographers don’t just make up what goes in the dictionary!
Other people come up with language questions they want settled.  I often find myself explaining that modern lexicography is descriptive rather than prescriptive – we just describe language as it’s currently used, we don’t make judgements about what’s ‘right’ or ‘wrong’.

Thank you Julie! For more about Julie visit www.juleswords.co.uk. You can follow her on Twitter at @lexicojules.

7 facts about Reunion Creole

I realise some readers might not know much about Reunion Creole, the language which is spoken as mother tongue by about 90% of the population* on the island where I live, La Réunion, in the Indian Ocean.

1) Until the late 17th century the island was uninhabited so there was no local population and thus no indigenous language. When the island started being inhabited it was initially by people from France and Madagascar, later by slaves from East Africa. When slavery was abolished in 1848 indentured labourers were brought in from India and China. All these factors led to a linguistic melting-pot, with French dominating but with input from Malagasy, Portuguese, Tamil, Gujarati and Hindi, and this led to the development of Réunion Creole.

1770 Map of East Africa, Madagascar, Reunion Island (Isle Bourbon) and Mauritius (Isle de France).

2) What is a Creole? Briefly, a Creole is a language which has developed from parent languages and which is spoken as the native language by those growing up where the Creole is spoken. The word itself comes from criollo (Spanish) and crioulo (Portuguese), words used in the 16th and 17th centuries in the colonies to describe those born and raised locally as opposed to those who immigrated as adults. A study carried out in 1977 by Ian Hancock counted 127 different Creoles world-wide, 15 of which are French-based.

3) Following are a few examples of  Reunion Creole words and their origin:

• carri -  the name of the main type of dish in Reunion (from the Tamil kari)
• papang - a bird of prey (from the Malagasy papango)
• Le Tampon is a local place name which comes from the Malagasy tampona, meaning ‘summit’.
• macatia - a type of sweet bread roll (from the Swahili mkate)
• malbar - person of Indian origin (from the Portuguese malabar)
• bringèle - aubergine (from the Portuguese berinjela)

Mauritian musings

I recently took a trip to Mauritius, a place I know fairly well as it’s Reunion’s neighbouring island, but where I hadn’t been back to since 2001.

Mauritius doesn’t have official languages, although English is the ‘unofficial’ official language, used for business and government, and French is used more in culture and education. However inhabitants’ native language is Mauritian Creole, which although still French-based, is sufficiently different from Reunion Creole for me to have trouble understanding it (although of course I’m not a native speaker of Reunion Creole; mother-tongue speakers of the latter have less trouble understanding Mauritian Creole than I do).

Mauritius has its own Google, available in Mauritian Creole.

Generally speaking Mauritians will spontaneously address a foreigner in French, but switch easily to English if that foreigner is non-French speaking. However the Mauritian bilingualism can sometimes lead to confusion, such as on the following sign which mixes the English “sale” with the French “chemise”, with amusing consequences if you understand both languages.

Another sign also made me smile, as the writer had obviously forgotten the English word ‘butt’ for a cigarette end while writing it!

How language can reflect cultural assumptions

I recently listened to a podcast on the BBC’s “From our Own Correspondent” programme (you can read the corresponding article here : BBC News – Meghalaya, India: Where women rule, and men are suffragettes or listen here) about a small north-eastern Indian state which operates under a  matrilineal system. Here men are the downtrodden gender and a men’s rights movement has been created. Interestingly the comment was made that the local Khasi language reflects this cultural, gender-based assumption:

“A tree is masculine, but when it is turned into wood, it becomes feminine,” says the president of the movement. ”The same is true of many of the nouns in our language. When something becomes useful, its gender becomes female”.

Rather like in French “un arbre” for a tree but “une planche” for a plank of wood. I’d never really thought of things that way, in terms of usefulness. Don’t you think the men are taking things a bit far? At least English doesn’t have the same problem!

P.S. Funnily enough while listening to this podcast I found out that Cherrapunji, a town in Meghalaya holds the world records for the most amount of rain in 4 days, 31 days, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 11 and 12 months, and two years. This was of interest to me as Reunion Island, where I live, holds the world records for the most amount of rain in 9, 18 1/2, and 24 hours, and 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 days! You can read my blog post about it here.

Just the tonic!

I was recently in India and couldn’t help but smile when I saw the following on a drinks menu in Delhi:

toxic or tonic?

I know India has a reputation for bad drinking water, but “toxic” is taking it a bit far! As for “Beverage’s” I found plurals written this way all over the country.

Also while in India I saw the following slogan for the state of Rajasthan. While technically not a mistake, I felt sure the double meaning was not intentional:

Here are a few other mistakes I’ve seen and photographed:

this was in the lavatory on an Air Koryo flight on my way back from a trip to North Korea.

As I lived in South Korea for three years I had plenty of chances to see mistakes in English language signs. It’s not easy when English is not your native language, and the Roman alphabet is not yours (Korea uses the hangeul alphabet).

fish from hell?

future alcoholic dogs? (p and b are the same in Korean so they're often mistaken for each other when written English)

I used the following product but I’ve still got my eyes and lips…

does "sensitive" mean it removes them carefully?

Do you have any photos you’d like to share?

Taking turns

“Happenings” related to translation on Reunion Island are sufficiently rare for me to get excited about whatever comes my way – I can’t afford to be fussy!

Which is why one recent Saturday morning I found myself with a few dozen other people in an amphitheatre of the Faculty of Letters and Humanities of the local University for a “journée d’étude” (literally a “study day”, but this was actually only a half day), called Le Tournant Traductologique, literally ‘the Turn in Translation Studies‘.

Organised by the Centre de Recherches Littéraires et Historiques de l’Océan Indien (CRLHOI; Indian Ocean Centre for Literary and Historical Research), the introduction was enough to put off the most faint-hearted:

“Indissociable du tournant pragmatique en sciences du langage, le tournant traductologique s’opère au moment où les théories et méthodes de traduction visent une modélisation sémiotique des transferts culturels au lieu de se cantonner aux opérations de transfert d’un texte d’une langue dans une autre. Ce changement coïncide avec l’ouverture du champ épistémologique de la traduction à l’ensemble des sciences humaines. L’accélération du phénomène dans les années 1980 s’explique en bonne partie par les effets de la mondialisation sur les modes de communication et sur les diversités culturelles. La traduction joue alors un rôle crucial dans le rapprochement des hommes, l’échange des savoirs et des cultures. Or, l’idée du progrès et de la pacification de l’humanité à travers la médiation de l’altérité n’est pas propre à l’époque contemporaine, mais elle prend racine au XIXe siècle en Allemagne. La réflexion suivante de Wilhelm von Humboldt résume en quelques mots la problématique à laquelle sera consacrée notre journée d’études : « Tant que l’on ne sent pas l’étrangeté, mais l’étranger, la traduction a rempli son but suprême. »”

{Inseparable from the pragmatic turn in linguistics, the turn in translation studies occurs when the theories and methods of translation aim for a semiotic modelling of cultural transfers instead of being confined to transferring text from one language to another. This change coincides with the opening of the epistemological field of translation to all of the humanities. The acceleration of this phenomena in the 1980s can largely be explained by the effects of globalisation on patterns of communication and cultural diversity. Consequently translation plays a crucial role in bringing mankind together, and in exchanging knowledge and culture. But the idea of progress and pacification of humanity through the mediation of otherness is not unique to modern times, but is rooted in 19th century Germany. The following reflection by Wilhelm von Humboldt briefly summarises the problems on which our day of study will focus: “As long as one does not feel the foreignness, yet does feel the foreign, translation has reached its highest goal”.} *

The morning’s programme

Participants were mainly doctoral candidates at the University, as well as several university professors.

For me one of the most interesting presentations was actually the first, by Laurence Gouaux, a critique of Rani Mâyâ’s French translation of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni‘s “Queen of Dreams” as it covered ‘my’ languages and had an accompanying written document.

All in all a half day very different from my typical morning as a translator; very intellectual, but it allowed me to take an in-depth look at translation, and that can’t be a bad thing.

* The rest of the quotation continues: “but where foreignness appears as such, and more than likely even obscures the foreign, the translator betrays his inadequacy”. Taken from the introduction to Humboldt’s translation of Aeschylus‘s ‘Agamemnon‘ from the Greek. In German: “Solange nicht die Fremdheit, sondern das Fremde gefühlt wird, hat die Uebersetzung ihre höchsten Zwecke erreicht; wo aber die Fremdheit an sich erscheint, und vielleicht gar das Fremde verdunkelt, da verräth der Uebersetzer, dass er seinem Original nicht gewachsen ist“.

A Fish In My Ear?

I’ve just finished reading David Bellos‘ book “Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything“. It’s an interesting book that I would recommend to anybody interested in translation and language. (Trailer for “Is that a Fish In Your Ear?”)

I have no pretension to write a review of the book, there are already several reviews out there and probably many more to come, however I wanted to share with you a few excerpts from the book – quotes, or passages that I found particularly interesting, noteworthy or surprising. I’ve avoided reading reviews myself, as I didn’t want them to influence me before I read the book.

“… many people [are persuaded] that translation is not an interesting topic – because it is always approximate, it is just a second-rate kind of thing … I [David Bellos] take the opposite view. The variability of translations is incontrovertible evidence of the limitless flexibility of human minds.” Chapter 1, What is a Translation, page 5.

What are words for? (Photo credit: Darwin Bell)

“Knowing just nine [languages] – Chinese, Hindi, Arabic, Spanish, Russian, Urdu, French, Japanese and English – would permit everyday effective conversation… with at least 4.5 billion and maybe up to 5.5 billion people, that is to say, around 90 per cent of the world’s population” Chapter 2, Is Translation Avoidable, page 10.

 

Talking of the domination of English, particularly in the sciences: “What we seem to have experienced is not a process of language-imposition, but of language-elimination [German, Swedish, Russian] … The survivor language, English, is not necessarily the best suited to the job: it’s just that nothing has yet happened to knock it out” Chapter 2, Is Translation Avoidable, page 13.

Talking about people “who declare translations to be no substitute for the original”: “in the absence of … giveaways are readers in fact able to distinguish, by the taste on their linguistic and literary tongues, whether a text is ‘original’ or ‘translated’? Absolutely not.” Chapter 4, Things People Say About Translation, page 36. How true!

“Just two or three thousand items account for the vast majority of word occurrences in all utterances in any language”. Chapter 8, Words are Even Worse, page 83. And in the notes (p. 360) we learn that “just 135 words account for half of all the word occurrences in an English-lanugage corpus of about 1 million words.” (Zipf’s Law).

“Roget’s wonderful Thesaurus reminds [translators] that in one language as well as between any two, all words are translations of others.” Chapter 9, Understanding Dictionaries, page 102.

Thesaurus (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Talking about the now ungrounded fears and mistrust that people had of linguistic intermediaries: “people go on saying traduttore/traditore* believing they are saying something meaningful about translation.”Chapter 11, The Issue of Trust: The Long Shadow of Oral Translation, page 129 (* “Translator/Traitor” in Italian). In the notes for this chapter will also learn that “writing has been invented four times: by the Maya, in pre-Columbian America; in China; in Ancient Egypt; and in Mesopotamia. All writing systems derive from just two of these inventions, and all alphabetic scripts from just one” (Roy Harris, The Origin of Writing, Duckworth, 1968, p. 177).

Changes in Mesopotamian writing of the word bird. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“Translation is the enemy of the ineffable. It causes it to cease to exist”. Chapter 13, What Can’t be Said Can’t be Translated: the Axiom of Effability, page 159.

“Since there are approximately 7000 known languages in the world, there are 24 2496 500 pairs of languages between which translation could in principle take place in either direction, giving rise to nearly 49 million  potentially separate translation practices…” Chapter 15, Bibles and Bananas: The Vertical Axis of Translation Relations, page 171.

Bellos talks about the existence of the ‘third code’: “the language of translations seen as a dialect that can be distinguished from the regular features of the target language.” (page 197). This has arisen from “the suspicion that the language of translated works is not quite the same as the language the translations purport to be in”, and has been confirmed by “scholarly work based … on the automated analysis of quite large bodies of translated texts in machine readable form.” He also says there is a “general tendency of all translations to adhere more strongly than any original to a normalised idea of what the target language should be.” Chapter 17, The Third Code: Translation as a Dialect, page 201.

“There are only about fifty languages between which imports and exports of translated books occur with any regularity”. Chapter 19, Global Flows: Centre and Periphery in the Translation of Books, page 208.

He mentions the use of English as a pivot language: “English-speakers are obviously not responsible for the use of English a a pivot, because the only folk for whom English is never a pivot language are the speakers of English themselves… English is made into a pivot by speakers of other tongues.”Chapter 19, Global Flows: Centre and Periphery in the Translation of Books, page 222-3.

We learn that in the European Union “there are no translations. Everything is the original, already”. This language parity rule has for consequence “no official EU text can be faulted or dismissed or even queried on the grounds of it having been incorrectly translated from the original, since every language version is in the original”. Chapter 21, Language Parity in the European Union, page 238-9.

Did you know a daily thirty-minute news bulletin is broadcast in Latin from Helsinki? Neither did I! (Chapter 22, Translation News, page 251).

Nuremberg Trials at courtroom 600, November 1945 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Concerning interpreting we find out that the Nuremberg trial of Nazi war criminals  in 1945 was “an unprecedented event in the history of translation” as it was the first time simultaneous translation methods were used during a trial. Today “between one half and three quarters of all students admitted to interpreter training courses fail to enter the profession”. And “only sixty-seven organizations in the world employ members of the AIIC as full-time staff, and only four employ more than ten.” Chapter 24, A Fish in Your Ear: The Short History of Simultaneous Interpreting, page 268-280.

Talking about the fact that translation commentary in Western languages often contains anger and hurt Bellos says: “It seems implausible that anyone would ever make such a statement about any other human skill or trade”. While he states that not all translation commentary is negative “when book reviews pay any attention at all to the translation of a translated work under review … they recycle one of a small set of standard words of praise: fluent, witty, racy, accurate, brilliant, competent and stylish”. And he concludes with “a translation can’t be right or wrong in the manner of a school quiz or a bank statement”. Chapter 30, Under Fire: Sniping at Translation, page 328-331.

I also learnt a new word: anisomorphism (used on page 82), which roughly speaking means “asymmetry”, is “the differences between two languages that create mismatches in a translation dictionary”. In fact it’s a phenomenon you come across every day as a translator, but until now I didn’t know the term for!

Although I’ve tried to situate these quotes please bear in mind they are of course taken somewhat out of context. There are also many other interesting items in the book – I have only touched on those that personally struck me the most, but I’m sure that while everyone reading the book will not necessarily find out “the meaning of everything” they will have gone some way to understanding translation better.

Words have a power all their own (Photo credit: Lynne Hand)

A few facts about the Korean language

I recently came back to Reunion Island after three years spent living in South Korea. While I went to S. Korea with the best of intentions about learning the local language I soon fell by the wayside, like many expats there. It would have been a full time job to learn to speak it fluently, and even if I had reached translation level, from a work point of view competition would have been stiff as there are many Korean-Americans working as translators. So I contented myself by learning basic, survival Korean … Anyway here are a few facts about Korean:

• Korean appears to be linked to the Uralo-Altaic group of languages which include Mongolian, Manchu, Hungarian, Turkish and Finnish, although there is no clear evidence of this. Some think it is a language isolate.

Some Korean food (Photo credit: Emily Barney)

• In Korean there are no definite or indefinite articles, gender distinctions or grammatical number.
• There are seven speech levels in Korean, each level with its own set of verb endings, used to indicate the level of formality of a situation.
• Korean contains many words of Chinese origin (nearly 70%), but has a different grammar. Korean has a similar grammar to Japanese, but sounds very different.
• Today Korean is spoken natively by 74 million people: 26 million North Koreans and 48 million South Koreans; and as a heritage language by 5.3 million in the United States, 2 million in China, 0.7 million in Japan and 0.5 million in the former Soviet Union.
• In terms of the number of speakers, Korean is rated 11th in the world.
• The Korean alphabet is known as Hangeul in S. Korea and dates from the 15th century. It’s probably the most scientific alphabet in the world as its creation was ordered by the ruler of the time, King Sejong. Until then Chinese ideographs were used, but they weren’t attuned to Korean pronunciation and grammar. It has 24 letters – 14 consonants and 10 vowels. The alphabet is quite easy to learn – I myself can read Korean – I just don’t know what most of it is saying due to a lack of vocabulary!

Hangeul (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

• The basis of words in Korean is syllables: just as in other languages one or more syllable(s) form a word. However these syllables are written by ‘boxes’ which are groups of characters.
• Korean has two counting systems – one is a native Korean system which goes up to 99 and is used for the hours when telling the time, counting objects and giving your age. The other system is Sino-Korean (Chinese origin, Korean pronunciation), and is used for the minutes when telling the time, numbers above 99, building floors, dates, months, money, and kilometres. I always found it rather confusing when telling the time to remember both systems and which did what!
• Two Americans, McAfee McCune and Reischauer, devised a transliteration system (to the Roman alphabet) in the late 1930s. In the 1950s the Yale system was devised. The Korean government introduced a new system in July 2000, and that is the most widely used system today.
• Korea was a Japanese protectorate 1905-1910, and was annexed by Japan 1910-1945; during this period teaching the Korean language was forbidden.
• To read the Korean press or some government documents you still need to know about 1800 hanja (Chinese characters) as well as Korean.

Hangeul (above) with hanja characters below (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Of course the above only touches the tip of the iceberg – like many languages Korean is very complex, and here I’ve just scraped the surface. But hopefully it’s given you an insight into a widely-spoken but little-known language.

Bibiliography

• Culture Smart Korea – A quick guide to customs and etiquette by James Hoare (ISBN- 9781857333657)
• Guide Hachette Evasion Corée du Sud (ISBN 9782012432178)
• Lonely Planet Korea (ISBN 9781741045581)
• Korea Institute – Harvard University
• Wikipedia