by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2015/04/16 13:20 +00:00, original URI: http://www.siao2.com/2015/04/16/8770668856267196379.aspx
It was almost six years ago that I pointed a few minor philosophical differences in the way Korean Hangul is sorted in North and South Korea in blogs like Sorting the DPRK all out and Sorting the vowels all out.
Now that is all well and good as a purely intellectual exercise and it has the luxury of being entirely true, but the isolationist policies of the DPRK have led to difficulties far beyond how the letters are sorted. By now, simple understanding for people who leave there for the ROK (South Korea) is blocked by the sheer volume of new words and concepts that have been introduced by and for the rest of the world....
Now, as reported earlier this month in the Japan Times and elsewhere, there are efforts to win *that* effort too:
Translation App helps North Korea refugees 'speak Southern'
Developed by on of Seoul’s top advertising firms, Cheil Worldwide, the Univoca App offers translations of 3,600 key words culled from South Korean high school textbooks as well as everyday slang expressions.
Unfortunately, the Univoca App is not available in the Windows Phone Store, so I can do little more than report on the reports of others, but given the opportunities for success in analogous situations like Spanish language speakers in Cuba, their hearts are in right place, at least!!!