Visit Korea Year...Years?
Wednesday, October 21, 2009 at 9:58 PM I am in a really sarcastic mood this evening. Having seen this at Brian in Jeollanam-do I was prompted to pen a little email to the creators of Visit Korea Year 2010-2012
Dear Sir,
A number of points you may wish to consider regarding your website http://www.visitkoreayear.com.
1. A year constitutes 365 days or one revolution around the sun by our planet. Though this is sometimes longer (i.e. during leap years) no where in physics, mathematics or any of the other natural sciences, has a year involved more than 366 days.
You're slogan "Visit Korea Year 2010-2012" could in fact encompass three years if taken from 01 January 2010 to 31 December 2012.
I think, perhaps, your understanding of "Year" needs to be checked.
Just a bit.
Might I suggest the handy English - Korean dictionary on Naver.
2. Who are you trying to get to visit Korea?
As it stands your website (noted above) is solely in the Korea language and to my eye there is no link to an English version of the page.
If you are intending expatriate Koreans as your audience then this is totally understandable, however Korean, a very scientific and difficult language, is not as widely used in the world as you might expect, thus the choice of language for http://www.visitkoreayear.com shuts out 99% of world wide internet users.
3. The English used on http://www.visitkoreayear.com is both grammatically incorrect by and large and quite awkward in it's usage. "Green and Human" ? Really? What does that mean. Are you making a statement on human skin colour, or perhaps using "Green" in terms of it's environmental collocations? Either way it is not clear in your usage.
4. The page itself http://www.visitkoreayear.com is poorly coded, fronted by a both bandwidth and processor intensive flash presentation which as it turns out isn't even interactive and you provide no low graphics / dial up / mobile version of the sight.
Subsequently after visiting your site I still have no information about the Visit Korea "Year".
I wonder how much money the organisations involved in producing this really crappy site have poured into it's development. I am pretty sure that monies contributed by the likes of the Korea Tourism Organisation, The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and Seoul City would have been better spent hiring at least one person fluent in English just to double check the use of a Language which seems wholly foreign to you and the site's programmers.
As it stands your site does not incite me to visit Korea in any of the years between 2010 and 2012 simply because I have no idea about it - thanks to your ill conceived, boring, uninformative website.
RegardsStafford H. Lumsden Esq.
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Reader Comments (10)
Excellent points, all.
I didn't bother deconstructing everything that's wrong with that website---you've done it for me anyway---but as some of the commenters said, iit's just so . . . Korean. I mean, would you really expect anything different? Would you actually expect a government page here in Korea to run something by native speakers? Would you actually expect them to get native speaker input? hahaha.
That most of the links lead to even more Korean sites or visitkorea.or.kr mean absolutely nothing is added for the non-Korean viewer. If you've done even a cursory search for touring Korea you've stumbled across the official Korea website.
I'm sure this project - a well-funded one, I'm sure - impressed the heck out of executives and other men in suits happily shaking each other's hands.
How do you change people's minds when they're so darn proud of their own 'accomplishments'?
[Minor point: a 'leap year is technically 366 days; a technical definition of 'one revolution around the sun' is roughly 365.2425, which is 365 days, 5 hours, 49 minutes, and 12 seconds (thanks to Wikipedia for refreshing my memory)]
Remember there's that 9-month long gestation period that counts as a full year over here. Maybe there is an 18-month gestation period to decide to visit South Korea.
They should also use the word "South" in their slogan as 50% of the single-word "Korea" has really negative connotations in the English speaking world. If I didn't live here in South Korea and still lived back in the states, every time the word “Korea” might come into my personal sphere of influence, I'm pretty sure it would be concerning the hooligans to the north and I would simple let it go as something inconsequential and meaningless.
Normally, I wouldn't comment on small grammar/spelling errors, but since you're calling the site out on their grammar here:
3. The English used on http://www.visitkoreayear.com is both grammatically incorrect by in large and quite awkward in it's usage.
The phrase is "by and large"
Adding to point #4, let's not forget how, despite Firefox having a 25% market share worldwide, almost every single Korean website with an English version has seriously reduced functionality due to the Korean government's mandate on using IE-only coding.
And, by the way, what kind of people are those 25%? I'd wager they're the web 2.0 generation, the young, cosmopolitan, adventurous, and most likely to travel to (or live in) obscure destinations like Korea. That is, if they had straightforward access to Korean internet sites and services.
@ Dave Conrad
A Malapropism rather than a grammatical error. Fixed nevertheless.
So yeah I have quite slow internet out here in the "mountains", nevertheless its not dial up slow, yet this site has been loading for way too long. Do you really think anyone overseas is gonna wait for that?
Since this site is basically all in Korean, I guess it is aiming at a Korean or at least Korean speaking audience. If that's right, it is not really relevant whether or not the Engilsh is correct or whether it is attractive to non-Koreans. The focus should be on whether or not it is attractive to its target audience.
This is what happens when web pages are conceived as publicity and not information means.
wow, that is such a lame site.classic Korean.