Emergency alerts now available in 5 languages
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The Ministry of Interior and Safety announced Monday that emergency alerts sent through the “Emergency Ready App” will now be available in five different languages.
According to the Interior Ministry, the application formally sent out its emergency alerts through the app in English and Chinese only. However, starting Monday, the app will also begin to issue its alerts in Japanese, Thai and Vietnamese.
The Emergency Ready App is an application run by the Ministry of Interior and Safety, which provides multilingual support for 36 emergency services, including emergency alerts, guides to safety, information on embassies, fire stations and police stations, as well as the location of civil defense shelters.
With the new service, the Interior Ministry stated that it looks forward to more than 1.7 million people benefiting from the new service. According to statistics provided by the Ministry of Justice cited by the Ministry of Interior and Safety, Korea had around 2.5 residents with foreign backgrounds as of 2023, including around 220,000 English speakers, 980,000 Chinese speakers, 270,000 Vietnamese speakers, 200,000 Thai speakers and 60,000 Japanese speakers.
The Interior Ministry added that the emergency alerts will be available through both text and audio for those who have trouble reading the alert messages through their screens. The ministry will also go through a two-month trial period before officially commencing its service after making changes based on user feedback.
“South Korea is seeing a rapid increase in the population of foreign nationals,” said Interior Minister Lee Sang-min. “The Ministry of Interior and Safety decided to expand its emergency alert services in more languages so that everyone, not just Koreans, have no difficulty in accessing information related to emergencies.”
Meanwhile, separate from the Emergency Ready App, the Interior Ministry also began to include keywords in English to their emergency text alerts in February, which are alert messages that are sent to users who are within a certain radius of emergency situations.
By Lee Jung-joo(lee.jungjoo@heraldcorp.com)
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