[KS] Re: How to Write Korean Names in English?

[Anthony]

Yang Sung-jin's question is not getting many replies, and I suppose that
one reason is that most of us have decided that it is one of the
unanswerable extensions of the romanization issue. As a Korean, my name
is An Sonjae or some variant of that. I have just received yet another
letter from England that begins "Dear Professor Sonjae" and I quite
often receive mail addressed to Prof. A. Sonjae. Comfort can be taken
from the thought that this is constantly happening to thousands
(Millions?) of Chinese, Japanese, not to mention Hungarian people and I
still do not know if Galileo or Galilei was his given name (perhaps
neither...). Untold numbers of the books we write vanish into electronic
oblivion when they are put into the computerized catalogues of libraries
and annual bibliographies under the wrong (given) name. The first volume
of Korean poems I translated contained (I discovered too late) the
cataloguing information on the copyright page 'Sang, Ku' and things were
not helped when the second poet I translated insisted that we should
write his name 'Kwang-kyu Kim'. However, the thing that makes me really
angry, given the fact that all the above cultures (and surely others
too) systematically write their names with the family-name element
first, is the way that application forms for admission to quite a large
number of American university Graduate Schools require applicants to
write down "First name... Last name..." with no explanation.
An Sonjae (Brother Anthony etc)
Sogang University, Seoul
http://www.sogang.ac.kr/~anthony


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