Want to know how to translate the name of that Korean dish into Chinese? Read this.

If you run a Korean restaurant here or abroad, and you hope to serve a not exclusively Korean clientele, things can be pretty rough. Romanizing the Korean names of the dishes is hard enough, but how do you translate them in a way that makes sense to foreigners?

It's not surprising that many restaurant owners resort to on-line dictionary translations. It's a dangerous game. Korean is full of homophones, and pitfalls are everywhere. For example, if you put yukhoe 육회 into a Korean-English dictionary, you might get back "six times". And you might put that on your menu. As your translation for steak tartare. And if you enter bangeo gu-i 방어구이 'fried yellowtail', you might end up with 'fried defense'.

Fortunately, the Korean government has come to the rescue with a comprehensive new app. Search for any one of hundreds of Korean dishes by name or type. You'll get the official transliteration and Japanese, Chinese, and English translations. From what I've seen of it, the app is extremely accurate and professional.

Since we here at Shou'er Journal pride ourselves on our technical savvy, I'm introducing the app to you via newspaper article. A digital photo of a newspaper article!

You can click through for a larger, more readable image.

One thing that's interesting to me about this headline is the way that Chinese characters (with alphabetic rendering of their pronunciation in parentheses below) in the headline efficiently convey a huge amount of information that would otherwise be quite difficult to explain clearly and succinctly. Chinese characters are rarely used in Korean writing these days, but their use can differentiate words that are homophonous and, because Korean spelling is so regular, orthographically identical.

The Korean alphabetic spelling 육회 could be the word yukhoe 'steak tartare' or the phrase yukhoe 'six times'. They are spelled and pronounced identically. So if the headline had just said "육회 gets translated as 'six times'", readers wouldn't understand the problem. Providing the characters makes it clear that the intended word is steak tartare, and the spelling beneath clarifies the pronunciation for anyone who is shaky on their characters—and makes explicit the homophony with 'six times'.

The picture of the app in the paper shows the jjigae 찌개 'stew' section, starting with kimchi-jjigae and dongtae-jjigae. (The makers of the app, who as I've said clearly know what they are doing, have wisely decided to stick with the familiar spelling kimchi instead of the formally correct gimchi.)