John ’26 is expanding digital equity in South Korea by creating multilingual guides for E-Government services, using community feedback to improve access for foreign residents and address the language gaps in the country’s current digital infrastructure.
This summer, I’ve gotten into contact with the Paju Exodus Church, an organization that hosts Korean-as-a-Foreign-Language (KFL) classes with various foreign populations living in Korea. Since my project hopes to extend E-Government service access to these populations, I first needed to understand which services they were having difficulty accessing. Through the organization, I was able to host a survey and collect valuable information on what difficulties foreign populations face when working with digital government services. Based on that information, I’ve started working on putting together a comprehensive guide that translates instructions for E-Government services into 5 languages (English, Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, and Uzbek), compared to the 1 (English) currently provided by the Korean Government. Throughout July, I hope to finish creating these guides and translating them into the five languages and launching them online for easy access in August.
Although the Korean government touts universal access as one of the cornerstones of its E-Government policy, its reach is far from everybody. Since Korea is an ethnically homogenous country (over 99% of residents are ethnically Korean), few government services take into account or consideration the perspectives of foreign residents. Attending an international middle school, I experienced second-hand from my teachers the difficulty of accessing government services, especially online. This experience has served as the foundation for this project.
