These proverbs are taken from a book I purchased in Seoul, 20+ years ago, called "속담백과" ("Proverb Encyclopedia"), published in 1992 by 대업문화, and which (as far as I can tell) is no longer in print.
The translations are mostly my own, aided by my rusty Korean language skills and the Dong-A Prime Korean/English Dictionary on my iPad. As I was never fluent in the language, and I'm certainly even worse now, the translations should be viewed with no small skepticism!
This project was undertaken as a means of studying the Korean language, but it is my hope that these proverbs may be useful to others as well.
If you find any errors in the translations, please let me know! Pull requests are always welcome, but at the very least, drop me a line and tell me about it.
In the 속담백과 book, each proverb is accompanied by a brief explanation, in Korean. In deference to the copyright holder, I've not included the original Korean explanation, and instead have simply tried to translate it into English as best I can.
In several instances I've been stumped by vocabulary or grammar forms that are not included in the dictionary I'm using. In these cases, I've done my best to research similar forms or words and used context to deduce the intended meaning, but in these attempts I may have gone very far wrong!
As I'm currently focusing on translating the proverbs in this 속담백과 book, I'm not actively soliciting Korean proverbs from other sources.
However, I would like to see these translated into other languages. If you would like to contribute to this project by translating these proverbs and definitions to other languages, pull requests would be wonderful! Just follow the pattern you see in the files so far, and add your name to the translators list, below.
- Jamis Buck jamis@jamisbuck.org