By Park Si-soo
Staff Reporter

The majority of foreign tourists visiting Seoul come from non-English speaking countries, but English is still the dominant language in cyberspace offering information about Korean festivals overseas.

Due to the lack of promotional Web sites in foreign languages other than English, travelers using English as a second language have limited access to information about Korean tourism.

``If I had known that there was a kimchi-related festival in Korea, I would have visited here at the time of the festival in October,'' Aki Hoshino, 25, a Japanese woman with an interest in kimchi, told The Korea Times. ``I usually surf the Internet to learn about newly developed Korean recipes. But there was almost nothing in Japanese.''

Gwangju Kimchi Festival (www.kimchi.gwangju.kr), which is held every October in Gwangju, was designated as a ``recommendable'' festival for 2008. But the only information on its promotional Web site is in Korean.

Jiang Enzhu, 40, a Chinese businessman who visits Seoul almost every month, also complained of the shortage of Internet Web sites in Chinese.

``Whenever I come to Korea, I seek festival information to use as an opportunity for business expansion in Korea. But it's rare. If they exist, their content does not provide full explanations about festivals and they are often outdated,'' he said.

The government last December selected 56 festivals out of 1,200 candidate events around the nation as festivals representing Korea for this year to help attract more inbound tourists. Among them, however, only 24 festivals are running their promotional Web sites in foreign languages ― mostly in English.

Among the 24, only nine festivals provide Web sites in English, Japanese and Chinese. Seven Web sites offer information in English and Japanese and the other eight festivals offer content only in English.

According to the Korea Tourism Organization (KTO), Japanese visitors accounted for almost half of inbound tourists in 2007 with 2.3 million. Chinese travelers came in second with 420,467, followed by American tourists with 419,960 and Taiwanese visitors with 326,189.

A KTO survey on 11,400 foreign visitors in 2006 showed that Korean festivals' foreign language services were overly concentrated on English.

Among the respondents, those who speak English as their native language gave 3.74 points, with five points being the perfect score, in a survey on the ease of collecting information about Korean tourism. Meanwhile, Japanese and Chinese tourists marked 3.47 and 3.69 points, respectively.

The government agrees that festival Web sites have failed to offer information in diverse languages.

``The government has selected representative festivals and provided subsidies to them since 1995. But it is true that we have paid little attention to foreign language Web sites,'' said Kim Cheol, a tourism ministry official in charge of festivals. ``The government notably increased the budget for foreign language services from this year. It also allocated more manpower to provide diverse language services as well as promote Korean festivals overseas more efficiently.''

pss@koreatimes.co.kr