Archive for the ‘language rant’ Category
Deadline week, and Korean media rant
This is the deadline week, and as such all other plans are being subsumed by an inevitable march of unexpected issues. We are planning to have the magazine out by the end of the week. I would have liked to write some more here today but I’m afraid I don’t have enough time.
But there is one thing we could talk about, which is something that Chun Go-eun, the managing editor, was complaining about today. It is the peculiar way in which Koreans mangle their own language when writing news. Apparently there is normal Korean, which people use in their day to day lives, and then there is newspaper Korean, which is almost unintelligible. According to Clair (Go-eun), “You see, this Korean media writing style thing, this is not Korean. it’s some… undefined language.” The entire thing is written in Hangul, the Korean alphabet, but there are Hangul references to Chinese words sprinkled throughout each article. This makes many articles, especially technical articles with specialized terms, actually Chinese language lessons for the average Korean reader.
If you are a reader of English-language Korean press, you might have seen something similar in the way that many Korean writers use English language acronyms. They have a habit of just throwing acronyms into the text without explaining what they stand for or where they came from, and just running with them. Unfortunately most acronyms in English have multiple meanings depending on context and subject matter, a nuance that seems to escape many English-language Korean reporters.
