koHangul scriptHow to translate WordPress to Korean
Korean (한국어) reaches roughly ~80 millionspeakers. Here's what's actually involved in translating a WordPress site into it — the technical setup, the Korean-specific gotchas, and the SEO.
What's specific to Korean
Most of translating WordPress is the same in any language, but each language has quirks that break layouts or SEO if you ignore them. For Korean:
- Hangul is alphabetic but composed into syllable blocks — ensure proper font support.
- Spacing rules exist but differ from English; don't force English line-breaking.
- Formality: Several speech levels (honorifics) — keep register consistent.
Step by step
1. Add Korean as a target language
Set your source language, then add Korean (ko) as a target. With an automatic plugin you don't create a translated copy of every page by hand — it translates on the fly.
2. Translate — automatically or by hand
Machine and AI translation get you Korean coverage in minutes; review the strings that matter (navigation, calls to action, legal) for the right register. Estimate the cost with the translation cost calculator.
3. Serve it under a clean URL
Publish Korean under a language-prefixed path like /ko/. Give pages readable slugs with the slug generator — important for Korean, since Hangul characters otherwise become percent-encoded in URLs.
4. Get the Korean SEO right
Add reciprocal hreflang pointing at your ko version (with x-default), set <html lang="ko">, and translate titles and meta descriptions. Build the tags with the hreflang generator and verify with the hreflang checker.
Doing it the easy way
Gloty translates your whole site into Korean automatically with the AI provider you choose, stores it in your own database, and emits the correct hreflang and lang/dir attributes for you. See how it stacks up against Weglot and WPML, or read the pillar guide on making WordPress multilingual.
Add Korean to your WordPress site in minutes — automatic AI translation, stored in your own database.