Korean ice hockey teams lost in translation

SEOUL: The unified Korean women’s ice hockey team faced an unexpected challenge at their first joint training session, reports said Monday — vastly different hockey terminology on either side of the divided peninsula.

Seven decades of almost total separation after the 1950-53 Korean War, with all ordinary civilian contact blocked between North and South, has seen their once common language diverge in many respects. The two Koreas still share the same writing system, known as Hangul — an alphabet developed in the 15th century to replace Chinese characters.

But different words are emerging as they develop separately, and in the capitalist South, ice hockey players adapted the sounds of English words for most sporting terms. Skating is called “seu-ke-ee-ting” and a “t-push” — a defensive technique by a goalie — is “tee-pu-sh”.

But the North created its own Korean-language words for each move, calling skating “apuro jee chee gee”, while a “t-push” is a “moonjeegee eedong”, literally meaning “a move by a gatekeeper”. To overcome communication issues the South’s sports authorities put together a list of the different vocabularies and distributed it to the players ahead of their first skate together on Sunday.

It also includes the English pronunciation of the North Korean terms — apparently for the use of the South Korean team’s Canadian coach Sarah Murray. The list was intended “to help players understand”, one official of the Korea Ice Hockey Association (KIHA) told the South’s top-selling Chosun daily. “But people are still in the process of getting used to it, so we hear a mishmash of terms from both sides during practice.”