Seoul Man, page 19
This headline wasn’t making me laugh; it was making me sick. Not just because of my personal peccadilloes but because, as a major global automaker, this sort of thing should not happen.
The way English is produced at Korean companies—and this is probably true of most non-English-speaking companies around the world—typically follows a system: the content is written in the native tongue, in this case Korean. Then it is sent out to a local translation agency. These agencies, at least in Seoul, have widely varying competence. Although many of them employ native English speakers, some are native English speakers from the U.S., some native-English speakers from Australia, some native English speakers from Canada, and so on. You can see the problem. Or these translation agencies employ Koreans who are, in theory, bilingual, fluent in Korean and English. But there are two problems here: first, which English are they fluent in, American or British? Second, Korean grammar is different from English grammar. For instance, in Korean, the verb comes toward the end of the sentence, unlike in English. That’s why Korean translated into English invariably is in the passive, not active, voice, which creates deadly run-on prose. The passive voice always takes too long to get to the point. This is one of the elements of “Konglish,” or Korean English.
After the translation agencies return the content to the company translated into a kind of English, the originating teams at Hyundai would publish it in the form of a product brochure, or ad, or text on a film, or a corporate website. The alternative is that the copy is written in-house, in English, by a bilingual Korean. But unless that person reads and writes native-level English, again, you often get Konglish. In addition, there was no one filter through which all English generated by Hyundai headquarters must pass, so that meant there was no one standard of English. Aside from the fact that we were publishing incorrect English, we were publishing English written in many voices.
Because Koreans are schooled in English from childhood, many Koreans think they have a good command of English. Instead, what they have is “test English,” which is taught generally by Koreans, not native English speakers, and is geared for achievement on the national college entrance exam, not for daily use with native speakers. As Eduardo once told me, “Sir, it may be hard for us to speak and write Western English, but we can diagram the hell out of a sentence.” Thus, Konglish may be unclear or baroque to English speakers, and the Koreans are at a loss to understand why.
A couple examples that I ran across during my time editing copy at Hyundai:
I am confident to say that the greatest dedication you have made would be a stepping-stone for the exceptional total brand experience before and after sales as well as during the ownership of Hyundai car.
And:
Recognizing such desperate efforts for quality improvement, many customers are turning to Hyundai.
I am not including these examples to get easy laughs or take cheap shots. It is only to illustrate how hard it is for nonnative speakers to understand exactly what native-standard English looks like. The translation labyrinth aside, the larger issue was that Koreans were trying to write publication-level text in a language that was not their own. It’s difficult for anyone to work in a foreign language. You try writing marketing copy in Korean. Because I had never learned a foreign language, I had no gauge of how difficult this was. A Korean trying to learn English is not like an English speaker trying to learn Spanish. At least English and Spanish share the same alphabet and sounds. It’s more like an English speaker trying to learn Chinese and execute it at business-level proficiency. Good luck with that.
Add to this the issue of tone between cultures: references that one culture will instantly get will be unfamiliar to the other. Touchstone emotions vary widely. Representations of deeply held love and sentiment in the East, for instance, may seem childlike and saccharine to Western consumers. Worse, even though East and West may more or less understand the definition of a word, all the rest of that word’s freight—connotation, context, racial signifiers, and so on—can easily get lost in translation. For example, in the summer of 2012, Korean Air opened a new route to Kenya. In ads for the service, Korean Air wrote: “Fly to Nairobi with Korean Air and enjoy the grand Africa savanna, the safari tour, and the indigenous people full of primitive energy.” Turned into a subject of Twitter mockery, Korean Air quickly apologized. Some good-natured Kenyans took it in stride, one Tweeting, “Thinking of lion hunting today and maybe some elephant baiting to deal with my #PrimitiveEnergy.”
The offense goes both ways. I was lecturing to an MBA class at Seoul’s Yonsei University once and wanted to outline Hyundai’s family ownership. I grabbed the first colored marker I saw and began writing the names of prominent family members on the whiteboard. I turned around to make a point to the class and saw one Korean student had his hand up.
“Yes?” I said.
“Why did you write their names in red?” he asked.
“Oh, no,” I thought. The minute he asked the question, I realized: in Korea, and in some other Asian countries, using red ink to write a name indicates death. I apologized profusely, explaining my faux pas to the Western students in the class, then erased all the red names, rewrote them in black, and moved on.
I became acutely aware of how hard it is to operate—especially in a business environment—in another language when I fully realized my burden on my Korean team members, who were forced to communicate with me in English. At one point I asked one of my junior team members, who spoke okay English, wrote it better, and was always trying to improve, “When you have to write to me in English, is it 50 percent or 500 percent harder than Korean for you?” He didn’t even pause before answering: “Five hundred percent, sir.”
Part of my job was to edit the official English correspondence of my higher-ups, write speeches for them, and generally deal with English generated by my bosses—and I was pleased to do that. But as it dawned on me that there were dozens of teams at headquarters generating English for external consumption, I realized neither I nor my team could edit it all, nor should we. We needed a dedicated English editor.
I alerted my team leader about the incorrect headlines on the Hyundai ads in the Asian Wall Street Journal and Financial Times ads, and he told me he would inform the team responsible for the ad. I asked: “And then what?” “It’s not our team’s responsibility,” I was told.
This was true, but it irked me. If I see a person about to get run over by a bus, I’m not going to say, “Well, that’s another team’s responsibility.” I’m going to try to get them out of the way of the bus. There is a saying throughout the big Korean chaebol that actually translates across most corporate cultures: “No one ever got fired for not doing something.” Risk taking is rarely rewarded at big companies, and an employee is best thought of and rewarded by working diligently for their team and helping to meet their team’s goals. The hiring of an English editor introduced all sorts of variables and risk into the system that could result in negative outcomes for those responsible. Furthermore, as the English editor would interact with a number of teams from both inside and outside my team’s division, it raised numerous reporting problems.
In hindsight, I have come to understand the reluctance to hiring a silo breaker. For all the outside criticism of silos within companies, some siloing must exist, otherwise every team would experience mission creep, goals could not be defined, no one would take responsibility, and nothing would get done.
But I was too new to corporate life and too aggrieved to let anything like the bureaucratic process get in the way of doing what I knew was right.
To me, it made perfect sense that we hire an English editor and that that person should be a member of my team, because we produced most of the English at Hyundai; because our team was often asked informally to correct English from other departments and could not handle all the requests; and because I was the only native English-speaking executive at the entire headquarters, and it made sense that I should supervise the English editor.
My team leader and senior team leadership were opposed. They had several reasons, all of them valid. But none won the argument that an English editor was not needed.
If I could have done it over, knowing what I know now, I would still have pushed stridently for the English editor, but I would have done it differently. I would have created a short but persuasive report, with examples of incorrect English produced by various teams at headquarters; then I would have cited examples of our competitors getting their English right; then I would have cited an expert estimating the loss in brand value Hyundai was suffering due to its flawed corporate English skills. I would have presented it to my boss and we would have discussed which team the English editor should be assigned to. Then, if it was decided the English editor should indeed be on my team, I would have worked with my team leader (he would no longer oppose the position, because our boss had agreed to it) on exactly the way the English editor would be integrated into our team and what their duties would and would not be, and the rest of the team would have been briefed accordingly.
This would have taken a couple months to accomplish. Instead, it took several months of arguing with my team leader before I finally went around him and showed some examples of bad English to my boss. He agreed it was a problem that needed to be fixed, and sent me off to HR to get them to create a position.
With some time and distance, I can see that my team members who were opposed to the idea were not just opposed to the idea itself; they were opposed to the way I was presenting the idea. By this time I realized I was living in a high-context culture—that how I said and did something was just as important as what I said and did. I guess I just thought I was too far down the road toward getting what we needed and there was no point in turning back.
I plowed ahead, got the slot approved by HR, and began the interview process. I settled on one finalist and had her brought in for an interview.
Her Western name was Aurelia, and I had seen her résumé: she was the daughter of a Korean diplomat and had attended high school and college in the U.S. She had had internships at major U.S. broadcasters. She was a young woman; I could tell from the headshot on her résumé.
When I met Aurelia in the Hyundai interview room, she was dressed appropriately for a Korean interview: featureless charcoal-gray suit, white shirt buttoned up, no noticeable jewelry. She was nearly shaking with nerves.
The interview room was set up in the corporate style: two tables facing each other, with a gap of maybe eight feet in between. My place was set up at one of the tables. A folded tent of cardboard was printed with my name and title; there was water and juice. Aurelia was to sit at the other table, facing me, a Grand Canyon of unease between us.
“This poor young person does not need any more intimidation,” I thought, so I came to her side, pulled out the chair next to her and sat down. The HR manager was alarmed. “That is your chair over there, sir,” he told me. “I’m good here, thanks,” I said, and sent him away, breaking all sorts of corporate and cultural formalities in the process.
Aurelia calmed down and gave a fine interview. She would later tell me my move to her side of the table put her at ease. I later gave her a writing test in which I’d hidden a couple Easter eggs: hard-to-find errors that must be found by a good editor. She nailed them.
Integrating Aurelia into the team proved difficult. There was plenty of blame to go around, and I take my share of it. But some of the team members didn’t make it easy on her, either. I had failed in defining exactly what her role would be in relation to our team. The team asked me: “Will she edit only English generated by our team?”
“No, she would edit English generated by any team that wants to use her,” I replied.
“How can we make the other teams use her?”
“We can’t. We can tell the other teams about her and strongly encourage them to use her.”
“But there is no process for that.”
“We’ll find a way.”
“Well, because she is a contractor, we will not show her sensitive company information.”
“You must, because she has to edit it and she is a part of our team.”
“No she isn’t.”
“Yes she is.”
“Her English may be good, but her Korean is not.”
“She was not hired to be a Korean editor.”
And then: “She is young and this is her first real job. Why doesn’t she have to do the same kind of menial jobs every entry-level employee at Hyundai has to do, like bringing the newspapers up from the mailroom in the morning?”
“Because she was hired for a specific skill.”
“But we don’t do that here.”
“Well, we just did.”
You can see how it went: basically, bullheaded foreign executive versus lifelong Hyundai employees who knew and followed the Hyundai way of doing things, and this was most definitely not that. I was certain the team would not help integrate Aurelia—would not spread the word about her—and she would be deemed a failure. Worse, Aurelia would be emotionally damaged by the fiasco.
It was, to be honest, a bumpy start. There were conflicting directions, cold shoulders, and hurt feelings. Aurelia’s dedication, good humor, and undeniable value to the company won the day.
And I took a lesson in humility. I admitted to my team leader that I had handled her integration clumsily. He began to see her value and helped spread the word about her to other teams. As young Aurelia proved both her competence—her English was equal to mine—and her flexibility, dozens of other teams sought out her skills. They became grateful for her ability. One team of Hyundai engineers had proposed an article to a technical publication that was rejected because of its poor English. They turned to Aurelia, she helped them whip it into shape, and the piece was accepted. I had hoped by the end of her first year that she would have worked with a handful of other teams. Instead, thanks to her resourcefulness, her fighting spirit, and a maturity beyond her years, she more than doubled my expectations.
At one point I told Aurelia, “You have saved this company millions of dollars in brand value simply by correcting English.” The bungled language in the Hyundai newspaper ads was only a one-day embarrassment. The positive change that resulted from it—the hiring of an English editor—would be lasting.
But that wasn’t my ultimate satisfaction with Aurelia’s hiring. That came on a day not too long before I left Korea. I took several of the junior members of my team out for lunch. As we were walking to a nearby restaurant, I looked behind me to see one of the other young women on my team walking close by Aurelia, her arm slung around Aurelia’s neck, the two of them laughing. She had been accepted.
“BUT . . . REPORTERS WILL JUST CALL US.”
I had a hard time finding a lot of information about Hyundai when I was researching the company before I was hired. As a journalist, the first thing you do when looking at a company is go to the media website, where you’ll find press releases, photos, videos, financial information, company history, biographies of the top executives, statements about corporate governance, and the e-mail addresses and phone numbers of the company PR people. It was easy to find the media site of Hyundai Motor America. But I couldn’t find the media site for Hyundai’s headquarters. It was puzzling.
About five minutes after I started my job at Hyundai in October 2010, I found out why I couldn’t find the headquarters’ media site. There wasn’t one. Hyundai was, in fact, the only major global automaker that did not have an English-language media site. They had one in Korean, for the Korean media, but nothing for the English-speaking world. All we had in English was a list of press releases. A media site is like a front door to a company for journalists. Ours was effectively closed.
To me, this seemed like Job One. My team needed to build an English-language media site, stat. If we were truly going to be a premium automaker, this was basic blocking and tackling. This was an easily achieved marker along the way to Hyundai’s drive to become a premium brand, or so I thought. Some senior members of my team objected to the idea of creating an English media site, questioned its necessity, or wondered who the target audience would be. I found it difficult to understand how to answer their objections and questions: Would you question why human beings need oxygen? One of my team members even said, “But if we put our contact information on the Internet, reporters will just call us.” I was speechless. We were in PR, right?
The problem was, my incredulity and outrage were putting the cart before the horse. I didn’t yet understand how, why, and at what speed things move in a corporation. My view was: Problem? Fix it. But despite what I initially thought, some of my team members were not actually trying to stop my idea. (Well, a couple were. The English-language media site would mean more work for my team and, more important, greater potential for making a mistake they could be blamed for.) Instead, most of the people on my team were asking smart questions about how best to build the site, what it should look like, and whom it should serve, and raised legitimate questions about the risk versus the benefits of the additional public exposure such a site would bring. As a corporate outsider, I did not yet understand this. And, in many ways, I was still thinking like a journalist: Make information available to journalists. Soon I would come to think like a company employee: Is this in the best interest of the company? One way of thinking is right for one job; the other way is right for the other job.
After several months of frustration, I eventually learned how to get it done. I made a brief and effective PowerPoint presentation to my boss showing him screenshots of what we had—our meager list of press releases—and the sophisticated, full-service, world-class media sites that our competitors, specifically our Japanese competitors, had. “Theirs look like a news site,” my boss said, correctly. He was a smart man and got it right away. He authorized the building of Hyundai’s first English-language media site. We contracted with a Web designer and started the meetings. Of course, the designers spoke only Korean, so my two best junior English-speaking team members, Ike and Eduardo, were assigned to the project to make sure the designers understood my ideas and directions and to ride herd on the designers, making sure they nailed down the details. They did more than that: they gave me valuable ideas about how to improve the site and even took the lead in eventually upgrading it a year after it was launched.
