The Korean government sends out many emergency alert messages for various disasters such as COVID-19. However, foreigners who are not good at Korean have a hard time interpreting these texts. The ‘Korea Emergency Text Multilingual Translation Project’ started for this reason.

▲ The official website of Korea Emergency Text Multilingual Translation Project (Screenshot from the website)

   The following project, progressing in Chungnam, translates emergency texts for foreigners in Korea. It cooperates with social innovation centers, volunteer centers, and labor rights and interests centers. It runs on a non-profit basis with college student volunteers. The team consists of students from Dankook University's Foreign Languages Department, Chungwoon University, Namseoul University, and Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. The service provides emergency text translation from Chungnam and the central government. In addition, it delivers translated information on vaccination guides for foreigners, Chungnam social distancing guides, pre-disaster guides, and multilingual translation poster files in 10 different languages like German, Russian, Mongolian, Vietnamese, Spanish, Arabic, English, Japanese, Chinese, and Portuguese.

   Emergency alert messages are translated every day and you can check them out on their website www.disastertext.com. You can also receive notifications by downloading the ‘Disaster text’ application in android app stores or applying to the following link. (https://forms.gle/4yb9oFNMNpfNLGaD8) For more information, check out the Instagram account @disastertext_dku.