France Gets Korean Awareness Campaign

When a French TV channel reported the death of Korean video artist Paik Nam-jun recently, they introduced him as Japanese. Koreans in France occasionally meet French people who think Jeong Myeong-hoon is Chinese. Samsung cellphones are wildly popular in France, but some French people think Samsung is a Japanese company.

The preponderance of these occurrences in France means that some French are still unfamiliar with Korea. For this reason, the website La Coree (www.lacoree.fr) was launched on February 27 to publicize Korea to French-speaking areas. The public relations officer at the Korean Embassy in France, Lee Seung-yoo, who manages the site, pointed out, “There are Korean materials in English on the Internet, but there isn’t much in French, so it has been difficult to reach the 130 million strong French-speaking population.”

Lee selected Il Communications, a PR and event planning firm with a Korean CEO, as a partner to manage the site. There are 10 people on the team, including a translator to translate Korean into French and a reporter to write articles on Korean-related news in France. Kim Mi-jeong, CEO of Il Communications, said, “We are trying to register the site as a major site on Google France, Yahoo France and other portals.”

Dong-Keun Keum gold@donga.com