Seoul South Korea Pacific Language Hub

From 1939 the Japanese colonial administration mobilized Korean laborers across the South Seas Mandate, shipping them out to build airstrips and coastal gun emplacements on Saipan and on Mili Atoll. Within two years American shelling had cratered the runways. Marshall Islanders and Carolinians lived under the identical administration, their schooling in Japanese and their ordinances issued from the South Seas Government seat at Koror. Seodaemun Prison, a municipal history hall in the west of the city, documents that colonial machinery from the Korean side.

Because those territories shared an occupier, Marshallese and Carolinian retain a stock of Japanese loanwords familiar to a Korean speaker, from hand tools to classroom nouns. Korean historians and island families consult the survivor testimony and the wartime name lists. A machine does not handle them. Our Seoul assignments on the period join truth and reconciliation sources to the atoll languages in which the descendants answer.

Even so, the claims remain live. Marshallese families still petition over ground taken for those airstrips, while Korean researchers request the Japanese-era blueprints kept in Micronesian archives. No bilingual dictionary joins the two languages. Those terminology decisions the translator makes alone. We translate the petitions and the blueprint captions directly between Kajin M̧ajeļ and Korean.

Trained at Seoul National University and posted through the foreign ministry in Jongno, Ban Ki-moon left the Korean capital in 2007 for a decade as the eighth United Nations Secretary-General. In September 2011 he flew from Honiara to Tarawa, the first holder of that office who set foot in Kiribati, and planted mangroves on a causeway against the encroaching sea. His Korean-language addresses from those atolls put island survival into a vocabulary of international climate cooperation missing from Korean policy prose until then.

Critics judged his two terms cautious. He answered the charge by making climate his signature. It was his office that put the language of loss and damage into Korean official prose. A Marshallese ministry sending Seoul a planned relocation submission today writes into a vocabulary of his making. We keep those Korean equivalences stable from one submission to the next. That 2011 itinerary, Honiara then Tarawa, appears in the public account of his tenure.

On 29 May 2023 the Korean government convened the first Korea-Pacific Islands Summit inside Cheong Wa Dae, the former presidential compound below Bugaksan. Delegations from seventeen of the eighteen Pacific Islands Forum members attended. Proceedings closed with a Leaders’ Declaration and an Action Plan. That declaration named the Pacific Island states a key partner of Korean policy. Ministerial talks between the two sides had continued since 2011, though only at official level. The 2023 gathering did lift the exchange to heads of government.

Under that plan, KOICA administers the grant portfolio from a headquarters in Seongnam, outside the city. The Action Plan sets out that Korean cooperation would widen across disaster resilience and capacity building. Korean program officers and the implementing ministries in Majuro and Tarawa trade project agreements and village-level teaching packs, most of them drafted in Korean and delivered in Marshallese or Carolinian. While preparing those packs, we also handle the professional training curriculum and the procurement and tender notices going out to Pacific bidders.

Fellowship schemes bring Pacific civil servants onto Korean campuses for months at a time. A Micronesian engineer who studies grid manuals in Korean will teach that content again in Marshallese at home, months after the interpreter has gone. To survive two crossings is the whole test of a curriculum translation. What those campuses need is a Korean-Marshallese equivalence set stable enough for a second teacher in a Majuro classroom.

Fishing under license in the waters of the Parties to the Nauru Agreement, Korean purse seiners buy days at sea through the Vessel Day Scheme rather than tonnage quotas. The Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission, seated in Kolonia on Pohnpei, adopts the conservation measures binding those voyages. Licensing instruments go north to Seoul, their conditions applying to seiners crewed out of Ebeye and Betio.

Once a trip begins, observers drawn from Marshallese and Kiribati crews log their sightings in a first language. Monitoring returns and transshipment declarations arrive in Seoul in Korean, and the port inspection notes, in Marshallese. Our maritime operations translators close that loop without an English relay.

At the enforcement end the stakes climb. Licensed fleets answer to two authorities in parallel, the flag state in Seoul and the coastal state issuing the permit. It falls to the coastal party to inspect a fleet flagged in Seoul. A sighting alleging IUU fishing becomes evidence in a Marshallese court. With one mistranslated position fix, the prosecution sinks. The Majuro node handles the inspection side of that file. From those grounds, Japanese-flag paperwork goes to Tōkyō instead.

There is a treaty organization in Jung-gu with five Pacific member states on its books, the Global Green Growth Institute, seated in Seoul since 2012. It is embedding staff inside counterpart ministries in Suva and Port Vila. Kiribati ratified the founding agreement in September of that year, which converted a Korean initiative into an international body. A Pacific state, in other words, put the institute on its legal footing.

One rule governs the paperwork: a fund cannot disburse until the affected community signs. Concept notes for the climate funds and the consent papers gathered for them make up the bulk of it. We prepare the green finance and investment material in Korean and English, and the free, prior and informed consent documents in Marshallese for atoll signatories. One signature there binds a family and its heirs for a generation.

Of the whole set, the grid schedules give the most trouble. Korean engineers specify solar arrays and battery storage in technical wording borrowed wholesale from English into the island tongues. Since adaptation funding lasts a decade or longer, the wording must stay put. Building that equivalence set at the concept-note stage lets the commissioning report reuse it ten years on.