When Nathan Schwartzman started his site Korea Beat earlier this year it’s obvious he didn’t have anything fancy in mind. The layout is simple, as are the intentions; straight-no-chaser translations of Korean newspaper articles.

Raised in none other than Cooperstown, New York, home of the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame, Schwarzman is a big baseball fan. This translates into a sizable amount of baseball content on Korea Beat, usually an article or two a week.

Korea has a large expatriate blogging community. While several are Korean-language friendly, often offering partial translations of Korean media in order to emphasize a point, no one does direct translations of full articles as Schwartzman does.

“I had a few things in mind,” he says of the original concepts for Korea Beat, “I was already doing some translations just for fun, and I figured people would enjoy reading them. I wanted to give people a taste of the real Korean media, not the denatured version that usually passes for it in English.”

While nearly all Korean newspapers have daily English language versions available, the baseball content doesn’t even come close to the quality on Korea Beat. Both the baseball media and the general news media tend to keep things pretty squeaky clean and–and this is important–what the Korean media perceives as being Korean-image friendly and interesting to foreigners. 

Consequently, most of the baseball-related content concerns Koreans who are playing in Japan and America. These days Korean players aren’t having much success abroad. Lee Seung-yeop of the Yomuri Giants has seen a dip in his power numbers as he’s struggled with injuries all year, making the well-travelled mediocrity of Kim Byung-hyun the story of the year.

This lack of success by Korean players has made for a lot of passive-aggressive journalism, occasionally entertaining in it’s own right, but nothing  as informative as Quality Starts in the KBO, a translation that was incidentally inspired by Schwartzman’s summer reading of Bill James Historical Abstract.

“In the Korean papers you can read write-ups of every game–box scores, analysis, regular columns and interviews. If you’re limited to English you just can’t,” he says.

“I think that in general, many people find the English language media in Korea to be pretty anodyne…just not interesting at all,” Schwartzman says, “There’s a lot of: Korean Companies are Successful, and Foreigners Like Hanbok (Korean traditional clothing) and Kimchi.”

By contrast, the Korean-media-at-large is at-best generalizing, and at worst, downright libelous toward non-Koreans. Quotes by biased sources are routinely used as facts and statistical evidence is often provided by reporters with nary a figure to be found. 

Take the Sept. 5 translation of an article from NoCut news, one of a flurry of recent stories by the Korean media concerning several arrests of  English teachers in Seoul for using marijuana.

 Keep in mind these are literal translations, edited only for grammar and purpose of flow:

Foreign English teachers have been arrested for smoking marijuana before lessons and habitually using drugs in seedy areas.

The number of foreign English teachers who regularly use drugs is increasing

and later in the article:

A source at the foreign affairs division of the Seoul Police Department said, “American and Canadian English teachers think Korea is a ‘land of opportunity.’”

They become hagwon (language school) teachers not only because there is no country which has much desire to learn English as Korea but because they believe they can make up to 1,000,000 won (about $1,000) per month through illegal private lessons.

The source also said, “the majority of them find it easy to seduce Korean women and do drugs with them.”

Foreign English teachers see Korea not only as a ‘land of opportunity’ but also as a ‘perverted heaven’.

However, in the world of baseball the Korean media tends to be quite even handed toward foreigners, who are frequently referred to as 용병, meaning “mercenaries.”

“I don’t think they’re treated (by the media) any differently from the Korean players, whether they do well or poorly,” he says, however, also adding “the tabloids like Sports Seoul are more fair to foreigners in general than the big papers like the Hankook Ilbo.”

In the a translation called The Five Inning Ace, Sports Seoul tries to deconstruct the recent struggles of SK Wyverns ace mercenary Kenny Rayborn and its possible impact on the team’s current title aspirations.

The greater problem is that when Rayborn goes into a game this pattern is becoming increasingly familiar. Among his 14 wins just 4 came when he did not pitch six innings. Of his 15 games tossing at least seven innings, just three have come after his seven-game win streak.

While the piece is clearly critical, it’s done even-handedly, focusing on Rayborn because he’s viewed as a leader of the pitching staff and important to SK’s championship run. It doesn’t single him out because he’s a foreigner living out his pot-induced fantasies in the perverted heaven.

By-in-large Schwartzman believes the impact of the Korean baseball media is felt less than it is in America. He sees this as both a blessing and a curse.

“If you look at Yahoo’s baseball coverage, I can read Jeff Passan’s column about interesting stories in the baseball world. I can reach columns picking apart stats to see which teams and players are up or down, and I can get nitty-gritty bean counting fantasy baseball advice,” he says.

“In general, the coverage (by the Korean baseball media) isn’t that deep, which is surprising given how many papers there are dedicated solely to sports.”

Schwartzman also says that Korean writers tend to use less hyperpole than their American counterparts.

“I was surprised by the lack of wide vocabulary used in the articles,” he says, “In English we call a home run lots of things–a dinger, a drive, a bomb, a rocket, and so on. In Korean it’s just a home run (said by Koreans in English) and nothing else.”

“But they don’t try to get into the players private lives nearly as much, which I find refreshing.”

When asked about some of the more interesting vocabulary as related to the Korean baseball media Schwartzman cites the example of an inside-the-park-home-run, which if translated literally from Korean into English means ”a home run that didn’t go over the fence.”

Also, the context of innings are referred to not as “top” and “bottom” but as “beginning” and “end,” and a no-hitter is referred to (and said in Koreanized English) as a “no-run-no-hit” game.

Schwartzman has put together an index of Korean/English baseball vocabulary at Galbijim, a wiki dedicated to being an information source for those living, working, and travelling in Korea. Schwartzman serves as one of the administrators for the site, which is currently approaching 10,000 articles.

Since he started Korea Beat earlier this year Schwartzman has received mostly positive response, though no responses from Koreans themselves. While he plans to pursue a masters in East Asian Studies in the United States next year, he intends to maintain the site from wherever he’s living.

“With Korea Beat we just try to offer a taste of planet Korea,” he says.