Hong's Hangul Conversion Tools
[Korean Transliteration Tools]

Send questions or suggestions to conv2kratsoridotorg.

This is a transliteration tool, NOT a tool for translation (of meanings)! If you want translation, try Babel Fish or Google Language Tools.

So, you can't just type in "Lewis" and expect to get the correct Hangul representation. You need to take a look at the conversion tables below and type in how it should be pronounced. For example, "Lewis" should be typed in as lu-i-seu.

Currently there are three modes: MCT-to-KR, KR-to-MCT and Jamo-to-KR.

• MCT-to-KR: Use this if you want to see what a sound/pronunciation would look like in Korean characters (Hangul).
  • Input: MCT (sounds/pronunciation written in Roman alphabets).
  • Output: Korean characters (Hangul) with the normalized MCT and the web Unicode representation.
• KR-to-MCT: Use this to see how Korean character sequences should be pronounced. This is experimental at best and a work in progress. I tried to follow the standard rules as much as possible, but since there are so many exceptions you should never rely on this.
  • Input: Korean characters (Hangul).
  • Output: MCT in Roman alphabets.
• Jamo-to-KR: Use this if you want to compose a Hangul character exactly as it should be written.
  • Input: Jamo (NOT MCT).
  • Output: Korean characters (Hangul) with the normalized Jamo and the web Unicode representation.

Here are some general instructions for MCT-to-KR.

• Refer to the "MCT" columns below for the closest match.
• You can type in either lower- or upper-case.
• Use hyphens ('-') to separate the syllables. If there is no ambiguity, you may omit them.
  ex) hang-eul vs. han-geul.
• The second line ("Normalized") of the result also shows how the converter interpreted the input. See if that looks/sounds what you intended.
• For proper nouns (e.g., names), you may need to change some old (or tranditional) spellings for MCT.
  For example, the most common Korean last name, Kim should actually be written as [gim]. My last name, Cho should also be written as [jo]. Most people just keep them because that's what their family used to use. Besides, "jo" in German would be [yo], so there is no "global" way to do it. :)

MCT Examples.

• "Kim Seung Hoon": [gim seung hun]
• "Soo Yong Sung": [seong su yong] (?)
• "SooJa": [su-ja]
• "Yeonjin": Try as is.
• "Jong Rae Kim": [gim jong rae]
• "Kurt Wells": [keo-teu wel-jeu]
• "Vonett Baquilod": [bo-net ba-kil-lo-deu] (?)
• "Joseph Lewis": [jo-se-peu lu-i-seu]
• "Lee Choon Ok": [i chun ok]
• "Jee KyungHee": [ji gyeong-hui]
• "Pamala": [pae-meol-la] (well, that's how I hear it. :p)
• "Mariona": [ma-ri-o-na] (?)
• "Yoo-Ree": [yu-ri]
• "Anastacio Rivera Casison": [a-na-seu-ta-si-o ri-be-ra ka-si-son]

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MCT is a short for Ministry of Culture and Tourism of Korea. In July 2000, it published guidelines for romanizing Korean and for hangul representation of non-Korean words based on pronunciation.

On Wikipedia, it is referred to as "Revised Romanization of Korean" or "RR" for short.

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These tables are for the written forms of jamo. These are not for the pronunciation, but rather for writing exactly how it should appear.

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It seems quite a few people ask how to write something in Korean. I've been thinking about how to make this process easier. The best thing would be to convert (note it is not to translate) an English word directly, but this is not a simple matter especially for proper nouns (e.g., a personal name). Also, there is an issue of languages other than English (or American English).

So, I did think about using the International Phonetic Association (IPA) symbols, but most of the IPA symbols cannot be typed easily. There are derivative schemes just using the ASCII character set (e.g., Kirshenbaum (ASCII-IPA)), but still the IPA is just too scholastic and technical for most people to understand.

So, I am just using a method recommened by Ministry of Culture and Tourism in July 7, 2000. I am calling it "MCT" for short. The description is in the Guide section.

This script was done using Perl and iconv.

Source Code

• Google code hosted repository

References

• Standard Korean (in Korean)
• Roman Alphabet Transliteration (in Korean)

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