By Kang Hyun-kyung
The foreign ministry plans to set up a specialized department dedicated to translating English treaties signed with foreign governments into Korean to prevent typos and translation mistakes.
It was proposed as the government started looking for ways to remove errors in agreements after translation mistakes, which were found belatedly, have dealt a blow to the foreign ministry.
Under the current scheme, those who participated in negotiations for the agreements are required to translate the documents into English after completing deals.
“As negotiations usually take months or years before reaching a conclusion, those who are part of the negotiations are often burned out after completing them,” an official of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MOFAT) told The Korea Times, asking not to be named. “So they tend to pay little attention to translations, leading to mistakes.”
The foreign ministry is therefore seeking the establishment of a separate translation office. Under the proposed plan, translators will not be required to take part in negotiations.
Those who participated in negotiations will only be responsible for reaching agreements and will not be asked to translate the agreements signed with foreign governments.
“The creation of a separate body dedicated to translating a foreign language into Korean and vice versa required MOFAT to work with other ministries. For this reason, it will take time for us to have a team of experts dedicated to translation,” the official said.
In the meantime, the foreign ministry will consolidate translators currently working at MOFAT in a taskforce to check translation errors.
The official noted experts already began reviewing the Korean editions of some 20 multilateral treaties signed with foreign governments.
These people are looking into whether there are any typos or translation mistakes in those documents which were signed some 20 or 30 years ago.
“As these treaties were signed decades ago, I understand that there are some terms or words that are no longer used. The experts will replace the old terms with new ones,” the official said.
His remarks came days after the National Assembly foreign affairs committee dropped the motion of the Korea-European Union free trade agreement, which was submitted to the committee earlier for ratification, after finding 207 translation errors.
It was the third time for the committee to discard the pending trade motion in Korean due to errors.
Trade Minister Kim Jong-hoon was pressed to resign over the mistakes.
MOFAT is scheduled to re-summit the trade motion to the assembly committee this week for ratification after fixing the translation mistakes.
Lawmakers noted that the Korea-EU treaty is not the only one containing such errors.
Based on her personal review, Rep. Park Sun-young of the minor opposition Liberty Forward Party alleged that the Korea-India trade agreement also had several errors.