Question: Another wrinkle to this project. The Korean translation, as I may have mentioned, is destined for filing in both North and South Korea. This morning I received a message from my customer, courtesy of their agent in Pyongyang:

„As to translations of the published specification, the DPR Korea Invention Office accepts Korean specification only in Pyongyang-standard language.”

Being in the US, I have not really had any prior experience with translations for North Korea. Any advice you could offer is appreciated! Will we be able to edit the Korean translation to make it suitable for filing in Pyongyang, or is it going to be a completely different translation?

Answer: Thank you for the good question. Please refer to the blog “The difference between North Korean and South Korean” by which you will get some idea on how to handle North Korean.

Also we have consulted with our South Korean translator who is currently handling the translation job. Please find below the answer for your reference:

We can understand North Korean but sometimes it’s not very clear. Both are using same letters, and sentence structure is one of the part that has not changed not much compared to the others such as pronunciation or vocabulary etc. But there are some differences between the standard forms, pronunciation and some of words. For many words (e.g. borrowed words), they are using totally different words. Therefore, it would be difficult for us to translate English into North Korean and North Korean into English.

By combining all sources and references we collected, I would like suggest you don’t have to translate into North Korean from scratch. We can use the finalized South Korean version as the source and edit it into North Korean. By doing so you we can save both time and cost. – We charge only half of the translation rate for editing it into North Korean.

Hope above helps. Please don’t hesitate to contact me shall you have more questions.