On July 19, 2021, HUFS Foundation of Industry-Academic Cooperation (Director Park Young-Chul) signed an MOU with HYBE EDU, a subsidiary of HYBE (formerly Big Hit Entertainment) that is home to global K-POP sensations including BTS. Under the MOU, HUFS will join a HYBE EDU project to translate and localize HYBE EDU-developed Korean learning courses and resources.

 

More specifically, the scope of the localization project includes translating the Korean learning resources into different languages, converting them into audio files using voice recording, and examining the final sound files (including those with a talking pen) under the direction of HUFS professors.

 

Director Jun Jong-Sup of HUFS Center for Applied Linguistics (President of HUFS Faculty Council), who was instrumental in realizing this MOU, said, “Since unveiling the nine language versions of ‘Arirang’, a representative folk song in Korea, in 2013, our Center has released the foreign-language versions of numerous songs from original Korean musicals, translated Korean pop songs, and delivered various lectures to help spread the Korean wave. We believe that this effort has come to fruition today. HUFS is committed to become an important partner of HYBE EDU in its Korean wave expansion endeavors.”

 

This MOU is HUFS’s second cooperation arrangement with the firm. HUFS signed the first agreement last August with HYBE’s forerunner, Big Hit EDU, for its overseas Korean language learning promotion project. Compared to the first MOU, which gave HUFS the opportunity to proofread the Korean language content of the ‘Learn! KOREAN with BTS’ textbook, this second MOU holds significance in ensuring greater detail and sustainability in HUFS’s role of localizing diverse HYBE EDU-developed Korean language learning resources for different languages.