Technical communication in Korea: The challenge of gaining industry awareness

With a rapidly developing economy that thrives on exports, Korea finds itself in need of high-quality technical documentation, but lacks experience and staff.

Text by Kim Yangsook

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Technical communication in Korea: The challenge of gaining industry awareness

Korea has a strong export-driven economy composed mainly of manufacturing industries for electric and electronic products, automobiles, ships and machinery. In fact, Korea joined the Trillion dollar club of world economies in 2004 and has since ranked among the world’s 20 largest economies. In the past – mainly from the 1970’s to the 1990's – the competitive advantage of Korean export items was price. The quality of user guides did not receive much attention.

However, Korea has since restructured its export strategy and the market share of Korean products has risen tremendously on global markets, particularly with regards to high-tech products. As a result, the quality of user guides is being emphasized more than ever before. In order to enter global markets, Korean companies need to localize their products and provide user guides in the local languages. The source text for local user ...