Announcing if-me.org in Korean
By: Kim Hyo-joon, Lee Gyu-min, Lee Seung-hoon, and Lee Ji-yoon from Kwangwoon University’s Department of Information Convergence
More communities need mental health support. Our site is now available in 한국어! This post is available in Korean.
Content warning: psychiatric hospitals and mental health stigma
We are students majoring in Data Science in Kwangwoon University’s Department of Information Convergence.
Our team consists of four members, Kim Hyo-joon, Lee Gyu-min, Lee Seung-hoon, and Lee Ji-yoon.
As you can see from the name of the department, we are learning mainly about big data while learning general computer science courses.
We’re still in the lower grades and have little experience, so it’s too early to call us developers, but we’re getting more experience!
How is mental health perceived and treated in Korean communities?
The Korean medical system is very well-equipped. Even with minor symptoms such as a cold or indigestion, men and women of all ages visit the hospital freely and comfortably.
But mental health is different. Even though there are no issues with cost, there is an issue with stigma.
In Korean society, the focus is mostly on performance rather than process. There is a tendency to cherish the health of the body that can cause delays in the results. It is less likely to care about mental health that can be relatively ignored and enforced.
Even if you have a severe mental health issue, when you tell people that you’re going to the hospital for it, you are responded with, “That’s it? You’re are going to a mental hospital with just only that? Seriously?”
There are a lot of people who think that going to a psychiatric hospital is a place where people go when they have severe illnesses like schizophrenia. They also think that mental health treatment makes already healthy people mentally ill.
As a result, people do not talk about mental health issues. The stigma is overbearing.
Why did you want to participate in translating if-me.org?
Our team was looking for an open source project that could contribute. GitHub is huge so we narrowed down our search mental health, for the reasons we described above.
Among various projects, the if-me.org project was perfect. Development is active and contribution guidelines are well-documented. Translation guidelines were also provided and translation into other languages was also active.
Above all, we liked the app! There was a similar community in Korea, but most of them were just anonymous counselling boards. We like that if-me.org helps you neatly organize your thoughts and medication schedule.
We would love to contribute as developers in the future. Translating to Korean was a good start to increase access to our communities.
Were there any interesting challenges you came across while translating?
If you translate English directly into Korean, the words have correct meanings, but the context is awkward. The main reason is that Korean and English have opposite sentence structures. Both English and Korean have many homonyms, so the translation results can be completely different.
We thought we translated things correctly, but when using the website we saw that our translations needed improvement.
There were some words that were difficult to translate. One example is the word “about”. In the app, “about” is the name of a button that goes to the link that introduces if-me.org, which is never translated properly if you simply want to translate it into a translation or dictionary. There are more than seven meanings to “about” in Korean depending on the context. The closest word to the intended meaning is “대하여”(which means, to say what it involves. However, it should be used with a preposition. Therefore, it made more sense to translate “about” to the Korean word for “introduction”.
There are complicated honorifics that are unique in Korean. In the case of English honorifics, it does not deviate much from the basic sentence such as adding Sir. In Korean, using honorific language changes a sentence drastically. There’s a lot of granularity.
