Review of Seoul Forest, a famous tourist spot, in Korean translated into English on Naver Map (Courtesy of Naver)
South Korean online giant Naver Corp. is set to upgrade its map service for foreigners to attract more global users as the domestic market becomes saturated amid the shrinking population growth.
Naver said on Wednesday it plans to offer a multilingual translation service for visitor reviews of restaurants, shops and others, as well as search filters for such places on its South Korean map.
Naver Map, which the company says provides the most comprehensive information on locations in the country, is the only local atlas service in four languages – Korean, English, Chinese and Japanese — powered by the company’s multilingual machine translation cloud service Papago.
The new service will allow foreigners to check reviews by actual users with detailed experiences and provide international visitors with the necessary information for searching places, Naver officials said. Foreigners can search for restaurants according to their preferences and desires, for example.
“We will advance the service further to make it a must-have for travelers to Korea,” said Choi Seung-rak, who oversees Naver Map.
Restaurant search filters in English, Japanese, Chinese on Naver Map (Courtesy of Naver)
TO RAISE NAVER MAP MAU TO 30 MILLION
Naver plans to accelerate the increase in the number of foreign users on the map with the new service. Its daily active foreign users rose 26.4% on average in September from a year earlier, according to the company.
The tech behemoth aims to ramp up the map’s monthly active users (MAU) to 30 million this year from a record high of 27.5 million in August. It is hard to achieve the target only with domestic users, the company said.
It aims to make foreigners, who use Google Maps, the world’s largest map application, in other countries, rely on Naver Map in South Korea.
According to a survey by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and the Korea Tourism Organization, 56.2% of foreigners have already used Naver Map when they visited the country, while 33.9% used Google Maps.
Naver Map has supported multilingual translation since South Korea hosted the 2018 Winter Olympics. The service provided only basic information about places such as names, addresses and business types.
Last year, Naver resumed the service upgrades, which had been delayed due to COVID-19.
The company added translation on other details on places such as business hours, reservation information and takeout availability in the first half. It also provided charts on reviews in multiple languages.
By Ji-Eun Jeong
jeong@hankyung.com
Jongwoo Cheon edited this article.
