The Marmot’s Hole

Language Nazis — not just a Quebec thing:

KT Telecom, one of the nation’s largest telecommunication companies, and Kookmin Bank were told yesterday by Seoul District Court they violated a regulation that any street advertisement in English must also carry a clearly visible Korean translation.

Ads and TV commercials by Kookmin and KT Telecom prominently display KT and KB, the respective English initials of their company names.

Several Korean language institutes and professors filed a lawsuit in November 2002 insisting the companies broke the law and hurt the nation’s pride by not also using Korean.

The plaintiffs included Hanyang University’s emeritus professor Suh Cheong-soo, Sangmyung University’s professor Choi Kee-ho, the Korean Language Academy and the National Korean Language Institute.

“The two companies, one being a representative enterprise of the country, struck a blow at people who love the Korean language and the companies must pay 220 million won for the damages,” the professors said in a statement presented to the court.

Don’t see rulings like this too often:

“Though the plaintiffs had insisted that the two must compensate for their wrongdoings as the nation’s representative companies, the meaning of ‘representative’ is so vague and it is hard to define the word,” the court said.

“They are not public institutions but private companies. They may have to feel guilty from a moral point of view, but they don’t have any responsibility to compensate from the legal point of view.”

The Seoul city government said it will decide soon whether the companies must take down or change their ads.

While I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about misfortune befalling KT, I feel kind of bad for Kookmin Bank. As the Chosun Ilbo pointed out last month, Korean banks actually agonized over their English names. In KB’s case:

Kookmin bank even changed its original English name to “KB” in order to be reborn as “a monetary group.” The bank’s former English name, “Kookmin,” contained the term “Kook,” which is an English slang term for a crazy person, prompting the bank to choose a different name.

Thank God the bank didn’t just substitute a “G” for the initial “K,” which it could have easily done, with disastrous results. It used to have this rather odd looking symbol, too, that prompted a friend of mine to call it “The Banana Bank.” The KB symbol is a lot smarter, but it looks like that’s going to have to change, too, lest Korea’s largest lender continue to trample on the pride of the people.