The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism announced on the 28th that it has refined 40 foreign words that are often used in daily life but somewhat unfamiliar, in collaboration with the National Institute of the Korean Language.
The ministry is operating a "New Words Meeting" involving participants from the media, academia, and youth to address communication difficulties arising from excessive foreign language use. They are refining foreign words that have high public relevance or are closely related to citizens' lives. The proposals prepared at the New Words Meeting will be finalized after a survey of 3,000 citizens regarding acceptance and review by the Language Purification Subcommittee of the National Language Council.
In this review meeting, the alternative terms for "sovereign artificial intelligence (AI)" were chosen as "independent artificial intelligence" or "domestic artificial intelligence."
Standardization of technical terms from central ministries was also carried out. The "initiative" requested by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was refined to "plan," while "partnership" became "cooperative relationship" or "companion relationship." The term "HR" requested by the Ministry of Personnel Management was standardized as "personnel," "pool" was refined as "candidate group," and "one-stop" was standardized to "batch."
There are also words that received feedback indicating a need for changes in the citizen acceptance survey. It was suggested that "green tech" should be changed to "eco-friendly technology," "sim cloning" to "sim illegal duplication," and "public program" to "public participation activity" and "citizen participation activity." The term "agility" should be replaced with "pet obstacle course," according to the feedback.
Meanwhile, there are also examples where refined words have already settled into our language. "Black ice" is used as "road frost," "blood sugar spike" is refined to "rapid rise in blood sugar," and "sinkhole" is used as "ground sinking."
The ministry and the language institute plan to continue promptly refining newly introduced foreign words and informing the public, and actively promoting easy public language policies through online media such as social media (SNS).