Korea IT Times Blog

This morning I conducted my very last interview for this January issue with Skand Tayal, Ambassador of India.  The Korea IT Times tries to interview each ambassador resident in Seoul whenever it becomes time for their national holiday.  Since India’s Republic Day is coming up on January 26th, we made an appointment with him to ask a little about it.

You can see the main bulk of the interview in this month’s issue, but the focus of the conversation drifted away from IT related things near the end of the interview, which was still interesting, of course.  Perhaps even more so.   We talked for a bit about the global financial crisis and what its impact will likely be in 2009.  The ambassador brought up something that I had not yet considered or read about, which is that even though the financial crisis has made a lot of jobs close and a lot of people lose investments, stocks, and homes, the agricultural output for 2008 was higher than normal.  He said in India it was about 4% greater than the previous year.  So while the financial crisis does have some problems, at least the world still has more food to eat than it did in previous years.

He also pointed out that India is relatively immune to the financial crisis, since it is pretty much a closed financial system.  In contrast to Korea, most of India’s production goes into the domestic market, and foreign investment is only 4% of total investment in the country.  This means that despite the problems the outside world is going through, India’s economy is almost the same as always.  He says that the country expects 7% growth next year, when most of the world is worried about a recession.

Look in this month’s issue of the print magazine for the full country report about India with more detail about that sort of financial thing.  Ambassador Tayal armed me well with a hefty amount of figures and statistics.

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.