‘this’ Instead of ‘fhis,’ ‘you’ Instead of ‘yor’

Incheon Int’l Airport Quarantine Office makes it a rule to hand out a short form of questionnaire to inbound passengers coming from certain parts of the world including some Southeast Asian countries. Passengers aboard are asked to fill out the form written in Korean, Chinese and English before arriving at the airport to avoid lengthy procedures.

The simple form mostly handed out to foreigners, however, is filled with misprints and grammatically wrong expressions, impairing the image of the nation. To point out a few, there are ‘fhis’ instead of ‘this’ and ‘yor’ instead of ‘you,’ not to mention jumbling of capital and lowercase letters. It says ‘For Foreigner’ without ‘s.’

To ask where people will stay, it uses a clumsy expression ‘Contact address or the Hotel in Korea.’ ‘the’ should be removed since ‘the hotel’ means a certain hotel referred to in the context. If it wants to use ‘the’ for sure, it should say ‘the name of hotel’ instead. But the most proper English expression is ‘Contact address in Korea.’

In addition, it asks ‘where you stayed during past 7 days?,’ which must mean ‘where you have stayed during the past 7 days?’ “There must have been some mistakes when quarantine officers put Korean into English,” said an official from the office. “We made corrections, but I think travel agencies are using the old form,” he added.

Min-Hyuk Park mhpark@donga.com