What You Need to Know for Captioning & Subtitling in Korean

In honor of the 2018 Winter Olympics set to start in PyeongChang this Friday, we’ll be taking a closer look at multimedia localization into Korean. In today’s post we’ll focus on captioning and subtitling specifically. Video localization for this market should be a part of any organization’s multimedia strategy, and subtitles in particular are a cost-effective and rapid solution – but the Korean language presents some unique challenges to text-based workflows.

This post will list the four things localization professionals must know to manage Korean captioning and subtitle projects.

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Why localize into Korean?

Korean is the seventeenth most-spoken language in the world, with approximately 76 million native speakers. But this number doesn’t fully represent just why multimedia localization into this language is critical for corporations, studios, e-Learning developers and marketing firms. The South Korean economy is thriving – it is the fourth-largest in Asia by nominal gross domestic product and the eleventh-largest worldwide. And its technology sector is booming – this is the main reason that the country is growing rapidly despite having a developed economy. And finally, it has a robust film and TV production sector, and its population is very media literate, making it an ideal market for localized English-language productions.

Korean has unique requirements for captioning & subtitling

The Korean language itself is quite interesting. Two hundred years ago it was written primarily with adopted Classical Chinese characters, called Hanja, along with local phonetic alphabets. In the 15^th century a standardized Korean alphabet was created to try to increase literacy – this eventually became the Hangul script that was heavily promoted starting in the late 19^th century, and widely adopted by the 1970’s. Today, the vast majority of texts in Korean are written in the phonetic Hangul, though Hanja literacy is still required to read legacy texts, especially in academic settings.

This singular linguistic history is what drives the challenges in Korean subtitles and captions. Here’s what you need to know as a multimedia localization professional.

1. Korean is a double-byte language.

Full Korean text support requires supporting not just the commonly-used phonetic characters, but also the much larger set of adopted Chinese characters (Hanja), since these are present in legacy documents and terms, and sometimes used as shortcuts or for loan words. That means that Korean is a double-byte language. While that term is somewhat outdated in the age of Unicode, these languages still have a few features that should be taken into account when creating subtitle texts – see our previous post titled What You Need to Know to Subtitle Asian Double-Byte Languages for more information.

2. Large characters + phonetic alphabet = text expansion.

Double-byte languages generally have complex characters with several strokes. Korean is no exception. In fact, Korean typography features a kind of syllable stacking that can make some characters quite intricate. However, because of its phonetic alphabet, strings in Korean can also be somewhat long – much longer certainly than the pictographic/ideographic strings in Chinese subtitling projects. Therefore, it’s crucial to balance the need for a relatively large, legible font size, with the need to fit all characters on screen.

3. Korean uses spaces to differentiate words.

Korean has adopted most Western punctuation marks and spacing, as you can see in the following text block with spaces highlighted yellow, and punctuation in green:

This means that this language doesn’t have the same line-break issues as the three other double-byte languages. Unlike Japanese subtitling, for example, manually setting line breaks in Korean isn’t crucial to a readable deliverable in this language – though it may still be desirable.

4. Make sure your template and output formats support Korean.

This advice may seem unnecessary in the age of Unicode, but remember two things. First, some legacy subtitle and captioning formats don’t support Unicode, or even character sets beyond the basic Latin characters necessary for English. Second, many intermediary formats or templates – especially legacy ones – don’t have the proper support for Korean characters, nor character limit information to aid linguists during translation. Before starting your project, make sure your translation template and final output support Korean – or any language you’re going into, for that matter.

Of course, JBI Studios’ caption & subtitle templates support the full Unicode character set and provide real-time length limit information to linguists.

Leverage your in-country Korean contacts

One final bit of advice, which will serve you on all multimedia localization projects, including voice-over and dubbing – make sure to leverage any in-country contacts, especially if you have marketing employees or subject-matter experts in Korea. Even if they aren’t familiar with localization or subtitle workflows, they’ll still have valuable knowledge of local terminology and usage, as well as insights into how your translations will play for your specific Korean audience.

Likewise, make sure to bring them into your project as early as possible. For example, you may find that a part of your video doesn’t “work” for a Korean audience, and that your project would be better served by transcreation, which requires longer timelines. Or, you may find that your video just needs a couple of tweaks to localize more cost-effectively. Proper and thorough preparation – including bringing in-country experts into the process early on – is the best way to ensure the quality, accuracy and cost-effectiveness of your Korean video localization project.