When Transliteration is a Sin

Twenty two years ago a “sin” was committed. The South Korean government made a top down government decision on language policy that violated the number one rule of language: facilitating communication. The language policy decision officially overhauled the Korean system of transliteration, a system mainly in place for non Korean speakers that allows individuals to use the letters of the English alphabet to represent the native Korean script Hangul.

The system adopted required 100% consistency in transliterating each individual Korean alphabetic Hangul symbol into one particular English equivalent romanized letter. Korean ㄱ became g, ㄷ became d, ㅂ became b, and ㅅ is translated as s regardless of how the sound associated with that symbol is pronounced or perceived in a particular word in actual speech.

Most of us overlook or take for granted that alphabetic symbols are not reliable indicators of pronunciation in language. Individual sounds are influenced by other sounds around them. In the word mortgage [mɔːgɪdʒ], the 'r' is glided and never fully pronounced, and the 't' is completely silent.

Native language speakers are not lazy, they are simply economical and efficient. In normal, free flowing speech, if your tongue is in a certain spot based on having made one sound, and/or in anticipation of making another, speech is affected. In our native language, we learn to ignore spelling conventions and rules. This is where casual users of language, such as tourists who do not have a lifetime of learning these exceptions, are at an extreme disadvantage. This is where they need an accurate transliteration to at least have hope for achieving accurate pronunciation.

Without an accurate transliteration foreign speakers are led astray. As one of many examples, take the Korean place name currently transliterated as “Sinchon” (written in Korean as 신천). In Hangul, the initial alphabet symbol is ㅅ. This symbol is represented by the roman alphabetic letter s [s] in transliteration . Easy enough. However, in Korean when the consonant [s] is followed by a high front vowel such as [ɪ], that [s] is pronounced as “sh” [ʃ] under the influence of a process we call palatalization. Thus, “Sinchon” is actually pronounced as “Shinchon” [sɪntʃɑn]. By ignoring this linguistic reality we are left with non-natives reading and producing the word as Sinchon.

Those relying on transliteration incorrectly say “sin” instead of “shin” in pronouncing the initial portion of that word. The “sin” is not just the word produced but the fact that it is incorrect and leads to failed communication. The real sin is that the South Korean government created this system in which exceptions for phenomenon like palatalization are not considered.

In trying to make a complicated phenomenon in language simple, the South Korean government instead made it (overly) simplistic.

Mind you, no transliteration is perfect. The internationally recognized system of romanization in place for transliterating Korean at the time, McCune–Reischauer, was not perfect. But not being perfect does not equate to being broken, does not equate to not serving its job of facilitating native/non-native communication and needing to be fixed.

Transliteration that most closely results in effective communication should guide our policy decisions even if we have to make transliteration judgements on a word by word basis. Some might claim this is exhausting work that would result in too much time and effort. But this does not seem to be a problem for an electronic world that takes actual pronunciation into account for every single Korean word we encounter on our digital devices. We can get it right. We should get it right.

Forcing a transliteration that does not account for linguistic reality produces results that do not match reality. Confusion and awkwardness result. So why not have transliteration that accounts for the reality of how people actually speak the language? How hard is it to have a language convention in which we can clean all this up in a controlled manner based on this linguistic reality? Instead, we insist on consistency in Korean symbol to English alphabet transliteration that only serves to hinder communication.

When consistency trumps reality . . . sometimes the result is a sin.