English-language legal services page rates poorly.

This is ironic to me in light of what I've post-dated to come out later tonight, but anyway, a government webpage that provides information and legal services to foreigners has been criticized by some in a Korea Times article for being unhelpful and shoddy. The page is here; an excerpt from the KT article:

``The biggest problem is that it doesn't do what it is supposed to do,'' Art Curtis, an American English teacher, told The Korea times. ``It is supposed to provide simple, easy to understand legal advice for foreigners here. But I find it pretty difficult to understand nearly everything on the site. Its has quite obviously been written by lawyers for lawyers.''

He cited the site's introductory paragraph as a representative example. Its front page says: ``This project builds a new statutory information infrastructure, which regroups complicated statutory relationships and presents them in the context of plausible scenarios, and provides clear interpretations of complicated laws and regulations.''

He said, ``I'm still not quite sure what it means. It feels like you need a law degree to understand this.''

Curtis also complained about its lack of detailed information.

``The site often mentions that if you have a complaint to lodge against an employer, you should contact the labor board that oversees the employer. But it never gives any contact information, or even the names of these bodies,'' he said, adding ``most importantly, they need to ensure that whoever we are told to contact speaks fluent English.''

Another foreigner said a wide range of contents available seem to be Korean-language statutory laws directly translated into English without adding further explanations. ``The site provides only brief and hard to find explanations,'' said Joseph Harte, a professor of law at Kyung Hee University in Seoul. ``Its goal of `regrouping complicated statutory relationships and presenting them in the context of plausible scenarios' doesn't seem to appear.''

Reviewing overall content, Harte said he had found numerous grammar, usage, punctuation, spelling and even typographical errors. ``Unfortunately, this suggests either carelessness or arrogance,'' he said. ``It also leads users to question not only the site's usefulness to its intended audience, but also, unfortunately, its reliability as well.''

Carelessness or arrogance indeed. Like with many English-language materials and services in Korea, you have to commend the idea but shake your head at the half-assed implementation.