Sorry, can’t supply their phone number!

No, the translator is not identified.

Apparently my explanation about the way names are transliterated was not clear enough. I am NOT talking here about transcribing “Chinese into romanised Korean.” What I meant is that two different systems of romanization have been applied in the book, which is confusing.

To simplify, let me explain it like this. Do you recognize the Korean personality called “Jin Zheng Ri”? Odds are you don’t. Do you recognize the name “Kim Jong-Il”? I assume you do. For you, romanizing the name of the dictator of North Korea according to the Chinese pronunciation of his name would be confusing. Try looking up Jin Zheng-Ri in Wikipedia!

In “Yang Bin,” the book uses two different ways of rendering Korean names. One is by pronouncing them in Korean, and then transliterating them into Latin letters according to the recognized international standard. Such a name can be accurately “re-translated” back into Korean. The other way the book romanizes is to transliterate the Korean name according to the way it would be pronounced in Chinese. All Korean names can be written in Chinese, and were for several centuries. The problem here is that most native Koreans and foreigners who have mastered Korean would not know how to “re-translate” these pronunciations back into Korean.

This means that interested readers, journalists and historians will find it difficult to identify the real people behind these sinified names. Difficult, not impossible! But the usage of two romanized systems in the book is, as noted, confusing and avoidable.

http://www.truthabouttrade.org/content/view/13215/54/lang,en/