Korean Trade Minister Kim Jong-hoon, who once again admitted that there were errors in the Korean translation of the free trade agreement between Korea and the European Union, said stronger measures will be taken so that such mistakes do not occur again. 

Kim held a press meeting yesterday after lawyer Song Ki-ho found additional errors in the agreement, even after the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade made corrections of the first set of errors that were found.

Kim said that such errors will not occur in the FTA with the United States as he has ordered a brand-new proofreading of the Korus FTA.

“I’m naturally not good with making excuses. What is wrong is wrong and errors must be corrected, and we are in that process,” said Kim. 

“I have some measures in mind that include making a proper team that does the job within the ministry instead of running temporary task force teams, asking for the help of professionals outside the ministry even if it means more costs for us, and having a grace period and revealing the first version of the translation as an unofficial version before everything is thoroughly checked.”

For the “unofficial version,” Kim said that everything until now was based on the English version and the employees at the ministry have always been rushed to release the Korea version as FTA deals are in the interest of many people. 

He said that the same speed will be kept, but with a one-month grace period, the first version will be released as an unofficial translation and efforts will then be made to ensure everything is errorless before declaring the translation official. 

“The localization process of the FTA agreement needs to be redone, as the Korean version is what all the companies refer to when doing business abroad,” said Song in an interview with the JoongAng Ilbo. “I provide legal service to trading companies and found that the translations were wrong when I found strange clauses, which can affect a company’s plans.” 

Kim said that all of the errors were in the many tables that take up more than 700 pages of the 1,279 pages, and such errors were simple clerical errors, which anyone could have made. 

He added, though, that the ministry is trying to find out who made the mistakes and whoever made the errors will be reprimanded. 

Kim said that although both the U.S. and EU agreements are important, the Korea-EU FTA is more urgent, because of the July 1 deadline. 


By Jung Seung-hyun [seungjung@joongang.co.kr]