The Ministry of the Interior and Safety is reaching out to foreign residents for their perspectives on a recently announced standardization of foreign name notations in administrative documents. (Image courtesy of Yonhap)
SEOUL, Oct. 11 (Korea Bizwire) – The Ministry of the Interior and Safety is reaching out to foreign residents for their perspectives on a recently announced standardization of foreign name notations in administrative documents.
The ministry will host a field meeting on October 10 to gather feedback from those most affected by the new guidelines.
The meeting, set to take place at the “Friend” Immigrant Center in Seoul’s Yeongdeungpo district, will bring together foreign residents from diverse countries including the United States, China, Thailand, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Brazil, and Mongolia.
Ministry officials plan to explain the rationale behind the new guidelines, clarify their content, and discuss the expected benefits. They will emphasize that the standardization applies only to administrative documents and does not regulate name usage in daily life.
To minimize confusion, the ministry will clarify that existing name notations will remain unchanged, with the new guidelines applying only to newly registered administrative documents.
The meeting will also provide an open forum for foreign residents to share their thoughts on contentious aspects of the guidelines, such as the order of surname and given name, and the use of spaces between names.
These new guidelines, announced in August, stipulate that foreign names in Roman characters should be written in capital letters with the surname first, followed by a space and then the given name. For Korean script, the surname comes first without a space before the given name.
For example, “TOM SAWYER” would be standardized as “SAWYER TOM” in Roman characters and “소여톰” in Korean.
The ministry’s initiative aims to address inconsistencies in name notations across various administrative documents, which have been a source of inconvenience for foreign residents.
However, the announcement sparked debate and confusion, with some mistakenly believing it would require changes to established name uses like “John Park” to “Park John” in daily life.
Hwang Myeong-seok, head of the ministry’s Administrative and Civil Service Improvement Planning Group, stated, “We plan to incorporate the feedback from this field meeting into the final guidelines. Our goal is to alleviate the inconveniences foreign residents face in their daily lives through the implementation of these regulations.”
M. H. Lee (mhlee@koreabizwire.com)
