hankyoreh

April 4. (Photo by Lee Jong-keun)

By Jung Eun-joo　

South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MOFAT) has ostensibly confirmed that the South Korea-European Union Free Trade Agreement (KOREU FTA) was, in total, full of holes. Despite the fact that the Korean version of the FTA contained over 20 mistranslations, for almost a year and five months the Lee Myung-bak ignored these problems while pushing for the agreement to go into effect provisionally on July 1, 2011, all the while putting out rose-colored economic analysis. The administration has also dragged their feet formulating measures to cope with the treaty early. Criticism of the translation first appeared in February, but rather than completely reconsider the treaty, they instead worked to railroad parliamentary ratification measures.

The instances of mistranslations released by the government itself Monday far exceeded expectations. There were 207 mistranslations that required correction. Most of the errors were close to beginner’s English. “Transplant” was mistranslated as “transfusion,” “subsidiary” was mistranslated as “local subsidiary” and “epidemiological” as “skin care services.”

There were also embarrassing mistranslations, such as mistranslating the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) as the Organisation for Development and Economic Co-operation, while the Aaland Islands were rendered “Alaend Island.”

The text also included 16 Korean grammatical mistakes. There were also instances of items being left out of the translation or added on at will. There were seven instances of the word “any” being left out of negative sentences, while there was one case of “vegetable ingredients” being translated as “ingredients with vegetable oil” belatedly discovered.

Since MOFAT unveiled the Korean language text on Nov 16, 2009, the Lee administration has never officially pointed out the translation errors. Despite the fact that pertinent government ministries such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Ministry of Finance and Ministry of Knowledge Economy made two reports to the National Assembly on the main content of the agreement last year and this year, and that 10 policy research institutes like the KIEP released glowing economic analysis reports based on the text of the agreement, it was never revealed that there were mistranslations in the Korean text.

The administration also paid an outside specialist 30 million won ($27,503) to verify the text of the treaty, but the agreement also passed this stage without problem.

Lawmaker Park Sun-young of the Liberty Forward Party said, “The administration’s irresponsible carrying out of its duties and the lazy screening by the law firm to which it was tasked were deplorable.”

The process by which the errors were discovered was almost an accident. Trade law specialist Song Gi-ho, who examined the Korean text of several articles of interest pertaining to standards for country of origin, found the Korean text so difficult to understand he compared it to the English text and found errors. Despite this, MOFAT, rather than reconsider the entire treaty, submitted a new ratification bill to the National Assembly within just a week after correcting some of the particularly shameful errors that had been pointed out. The administration itself gave up the opportunity to correct over 200 errors.

The errors were called a “working-level mistake,” by the Office of the Minister of Trade, which then said it would discuss matters with the EU and correct the error at a binational trade committee meeting after the FTA took provisional effect on July 1.

Afterwards, Song continued to point out translation errors, while MINBYUN-Lawyers for a Democratic Society found 160 additional translation errors. In the end, the Foreign Ministry once again withdrew the ratification bill it submitted in February. It corrected the 200 errors and will table a third ratification bill during a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday.

Trade Minister Kim Jong-hoon said, “Looking back, the administration’s early response measures were partially mistaken.” Kim added, “However, there is no change in the administration’s goal of ratifying the FTA in April and putting into effect provisionally on July 1.

Please direct questions or comments to [englishhani@hani.co.kr]