Naver to improve outdated online dictionaries for 11 languages

South Korean internet giant Naver said Wednesday that it has partnered with the Seoul-based Hankuk University of Foreign Studies to improve and update its online dictionaries for 11 languages over the next four years.

The move comes as part of Naver’s pledge made in 2016 to invest 10 billion won ($9.24 million) toward upgrading and expanding its online dictionaries for five years.

Under the partnership, Naver will fund HUF’s efforts to upgrade outdated definitions, fix existing errors and add new dictionary content for 11 languages including Russian, Italian and Swedish.

Among them, a Korean-Portuguese dictionary is being newly created, while the Korean dictionaries for Swahili and Hindi are going to be adding around 10,000 more words on top of improvements on existing content.

The foreign language dictionaries were created by HUFS, Korea’s top foreign language translation institute, and made available on Naver the portal website via a content-sharing partnership.

Naver said it would continue to work with HUFS, which houses Korea’s top foreign language translation training program, to expand and upgrade its online dictionary content in the future.

By Sohn Ji-young (jys@heraldcorp.com)