The guidelines from the viki staff remind me of 2017, when they wrote to me as channel manager for the kdrama Shopping King Louis and insisted we spell the name Louie. Should it be LOUIS or LOUIE? The staff totally ignored the embroidered underwear in the videos spelling “LOUIS” and the name of 18 kings of France. Here we are 7 years later and viki staff is once again flexing authority. The instruction to follow the name spelling in the synopsis is ridiculous. As Bozoli said, the synopsis often is very different from the actual plot. The name spellings often have not conformed to the Revised Romantization Rules of the South Korea. How is someone not very familiar with Hangul and the Revised Romanization Rules know when the synopsis is correctly applying the rules and when not?
Immediately after stating in the guidelines " On occasion, agencies and production companies may request that Viki make exceptions to these rules.
- Examples:
- 김수현 is Kim Soo Hyun, not Kim Soo-hyun or Soo-hyun Kim.
- 남궁민 is Namkoong Min, not Nam-koong Min or Nam Koong Min."
But it appears actor Kim Soo-hyun’s agency Romanizes his name Kim Soo-Hyun, and the viki staff also don’t inform the uninformed that 남궁 (Namgung per the RRR, Namkoong per the actor’s agency) is one of a handful of Korean surnames which have two syllables so that the examples don’t instruct correctly.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose