Why a two-page brief beats a fifty-page style guide

Korean web pages go wrong in predictable places: a price that was never confirmed for Korea, a product name spelled three ways, a button that leads to an English form nobody warned the reader about, and a page that nobody updated when the source changed. None of these are translation errors. They are decisions that were never made, so the person writing the Korean text made them alone.

A brief exists to make those decisions before the text is written and to make them reviewable by people who do not read Korean. The template below has seven parts. Each part has a fill-in line and a short note on what the reviewer should look for. A worked example follows for a fictional company; it is a planning illustration, not a description of any Foliroom customer.

Part 1 — Audience and one intended action

Reviewer's check: Is there exactly one decision and one action? A page that wants the reader to buy, subscribe to a newsletter and book a demo has three briefs. If the next action is in English, the brief must say so, because the Korean page will have to say so too.

We help small design agencies get client sign-off on deliverables. This page should help a Korean agency owner decide whether to request a demonstration. The next action is our existing demo form, in English. Our account executive responds in English within one business day, Central European time.
Example — Approvely, a fictional company

Part 2 — Source pages and protected facts

For each source page, one row with five columns:

Source URL
Purpose on the Korean page
Facts that must stay accurate
Fact owner
Date checked (YYYY-MM-DD)

Protected facts are the ones a translator must not paraphrase or resolve: product names, plan names, prices and currency, tax treatment, inclusions and exclusions, availability in Korea, support language and hours, and legal or safety statements. Write them out in the brief, not only on the source page, so the reviewer can compare the Korean text against a fixed list.

Share only the public source content needed to make the page. Do not send account passwords, customer records or unpublished commercial material with a public-page brief. If a fact is unresolved — for example, whether the USD price will be offered to Korean customers — mark it as an open question for the owner rather than letting the writer choose.

Example rows:

Source URL	Purpose on the Korean page	Facts that must stay accurate	Fact owner	Date checked
example.com/product	Overview	Product name 'Approvely' stays in Latin script; 'unlimited reviewers' is a plan feature, not a company claim	product marketing	2026-09-10
example.com/pricing	Price and conditions	USD 29 per editor per month, billed annually, tax not included; no KRW price; 14-day refund	finance	2026-09-12

Part 3 — Glossary and one tone sample

The glossary has three columns: Original term — Approved Korean wording — Note. The note says whether the term is kept in Latin script, transliterated into Hangul, or translated, and when each applies. Include the product name, plan names, the two or three feature names that appear in navigation, and your preferred one-sentence product description.

Example rows:

Original term	Approved Korean wording	Note
Approvely	Approvely (Latin script in body text; 어프루블리 may appear once in parentheses on first mention)	brand name
Reviewer	검토자	a person invited to approve; not 리뷰어
Workspace	워크스페이스	keep the transliteration used in the app UI

For tone, give one approved paragraph in the source language and say what you want kept: plain statements, no exclamation marks, no superlatives, the reader addressed formally. A single concrete sample is more useful to a Korean writer than a list of adjectives such as 'friendly but professional'. Ask the reviewer to confirm the Korean text is factually equivalent to the source and would be clear to the intended buyer, not whether it 'sounds nice'.

Part 4 — Formatting rules decided once

Dates — Use YYYY-MM-DD or write the month as a word with a four-digit year. The W3C notes that purely numeric dates are read differently by region and recommends this approach where ambiguity is possible (checked 2026-09-16).
Currency — Show the currency code with every price and state in words which currency is charged. Do not publish converted KRW figures unless you actually bill in KRW.
Tax — State whether prices include tax on every price table.
Names and addresses — Decide how the company name, product names and street names appear (Latin script, Hangul transliteration, or both on first mention). If the page collects a Korean address, the postal code field must accept Korea's five-digit codes, in use since 2015-08-01 (Korean government notice checked 2026-09-16).
Line breaks — The W3C's Hangul layout requirements allow Korean lines to break between characters or between words. Ask the writer to keep headings and button labels short enough that phone-width wrapping does not split key terms awkwardly, and have the reviewer check the page at phone width.
Language declaration — Declare the page language with lang="ko" on the html element and mark any inline English passages with their own lang attribute. The W3C advises always declaring the default language on the html tag and never using a meta Content-Language element for that purpose (checked 2026-09-16). This does not tell search engines the page language, but it does help browsers, screen readers and font selection.

Part 5 — Korean disclosure and advertising points to check with counsel

Two Korean statutes shape what a commercial Korean page normally shows. The Act on Consumer Protection in Electronic Commerce requires online mall operators to display the trade name and representative's name, business address, telephone number and email address, business registration number and terms of use (Article 10(1)), and requires mail-order sellers to inform consumers before a contract about the goods, the price and payment method and timing, the withdrawal and refund conditions, and exchange, return and refund procedures (Article 13(2)). The Act on Fair Labeling and Advertising prohibits false or exaggerated, deceptive, unfairly comparative and disparaging labeling or advertising (Article 3(1)). Korean statute texts checked at the National Law Information Center on 2026-09-16.

Whether these provisions bind a foreign company selling into Korea, and what registration or disclosure they require, is a legal question for your counsel. The brief's job is to make two things explicit: which company details will appear in the footer of the Korean page, and which marketing claims from the source — 'the fastest', 'the most secure', 'trusted by industry leaders' — will be kept, softened or removed for Korea. Write those decisions into the brief so the writer does not have to guess.

Footer shows the registered company name, address in Germany, contact email and a link to the English terms of service with a Korean note that the terms are in English. The claim 'the fastest approval tool for agencies' is replaced with a description of the approval flow and its typical steps, because we have no comparative evidence to cite.
Example — Approvely, a fictional company

Part 6 — Approval roles

Record the approved version — a version number or date, the list of source facts it reflects, and the approval date — so a later change can be compared with what customers actually saw. Google notes that it indexes the mobile version of a page's content and expects parity with desktop (checked 2026-09-16), which is one more reason to make the phone review the formal one.

Separating fact approval from wording approval matters because the two reviewers usually cannot substitute for each other. The finance lead cannot judge Korean phrasing; the Korean reviewer cannot confirm whether a refund window is fourteen or thirty days.

Part 7 — Update owner and change-note format

Including the old value lets the reviewer search for it in the Korean page and find every place it appears, including image text and structured data.

If your site publishes a sitemap, update the lastmod value for the Korean URL when the page content actually changes. Google uses lastmod only when it is 'consistently and verifiably' accurate and asks that it reflect significant updates rather than minor changes (checked 2026-09-16).

The worked example, assembled

Company: a fictional Berlin software company whose product, Approvely, helps design agencies collect client approvals. Audience and action: Korean agency owners deciding whether to request an English-language demo. Source pages: overview, one use case, pricing, demo form — four URLs. Protected facts: product and plan names in Latin script; USD 29 per editor per month billed annually, tax excluded, no KRW price; 14-day refund; demo and support in English, Central European business hours. Glossary: Approvely, 검토자 for reviewer, 워크스페이스 for workspace. Formatting: YYYY-MM-DD dates, 'USD' before every price, lang="ko". Disclosure: German company details in the footer, English terms linked with a Korean note, comparative claims removed. Approval: facts by the finance lead, wording by a Korean-speaking product marketer, publication by the marketing lead, reviewed on a phone. Update owner: the pricing manager, change notes within two business days.

That brief fits on two pages, and every line in it is something a non-Korean-speaking manager can verify or decide.

How Foliroom fits

Foliroom's workflow follows the same separation this brief assumes: you submit the source site and target language, review a private preview, request corrections, and approve a specific version before it becomes public. Update requests are made through the customer workspace with the changed source URL and the exact change; Foliroom does not monitor the original website automatically. A brief prepared along these lines shortens the review, but the fact and wording approvals remain your team's decisions. Foliroom's website, sign-up and customer workspace are available in English, Japanese and Korean.

A Korean localization brief your team can actually review