Start with one customer decision, not your entire website

Most localization projects begin with a page count: the website has 120 pages, so the Korean version will have 120 pages. That framing produces the wrong first deliverable. A first Korean page has one job — to let a Korean visitor decide whether to take a next step with you — and most of a mature website does not contribute to that decision. Press releases, old campaign pages, a careers section and a five-year blog archive add cost and, more importantly, add pages that will silently go stale when the source changes.

The useful question is narrower: what does a Korean visitor need to read to answer 'is this for me, can I actually use it from Korea, what does it cost and under which conditions, and what do I do next?' Across industries those questions map to four blocks — an overview, the products or services you actually offer in Korea, prices and conditions, and a working next step. Selecting the source pages that answer them typically yields five to eight URLs.

There is a search reason to keep the first scope small as well. Google Search Central states that it determines a page's language 'by using the visible content of your page', not from the lang attribute, the URL or hreflang annotations (checked 2026-09-16). A page with a Korean menu and English body text is not a Korean page. A few pages whose body text is fully Korean are more useful to readers and clearer to search engines than a broad set of half-translated ones.

The four blocks, and what to verify before translating each

The rows below give the block, the source pages that usually belong to it, the question the Korean reader is trying to answer, and the facts to confirm before a translator sees the text. Fill each row with your actual URLs and you have the first scope.

Block	Source pages	Reader's question	Verify
Overview	home, about, one plain-language product description	what is this and who is it for	the description matches what you deliver today; product names are spelled the way you want them kept in Korean text.
Offer	product or service pages for what you can serve from Korea	what exactly can I choose	every listed plan, tour or SKU is actually available to a Korean customer; anything region-locked is removed or marked.
Price and conditions	pricing, terms of service summary, cancellation or refund policy	how much, in which currency, under which conditions	billing currency, whether tax is included, contract length, refund window, and which of these differ for Korea.
Next step	contact, demo request, booking, checkout entry	how do I proceed and in which language	the language of the form, the language and hours of the people who respond, and whether the destination page is Korean or English.

The last two blocks are mostly fact-checking rather than translation. A translator cannot decide whether your USD price applies to Korean customers or whether support is offered in Korean. Unresolved conditions should be marked as open questions for a named owner, not filled in by whoever is writing the Korean text.

Examples by type of business

B2B software: a Berlin team selling approval-workflow software might have sixty marketing pages. A first Korean scope is the product overview, one use case that matches how Korean agencies work, the plan comparison with the actual billing currency, and the demo request page with a note about the language of the call. Integrations directory, changelog and case studies can wait until Korean demo requests actually arrive.

Experience and travel: a Lisbon surf school selling to Korean travellers needs the activity description, the meeting point with a map link, inclusions and exclusions, minimum age and group size, the weather cancellation rule, and the booking path. Photo galleries help, but the conditions page is what a Korean traveller forwards to a friend before booking.

Direct-to-consumer brand: a skincare brand shipping to Korea should start with the product pages it can actually ship, the shipping and customs information, the returns policy as it applies to Korea, and customer service hours in the buyer's time zone. Korean consumer-protection rules for distance selling are detailed (see the disclosure section below), so this scope should be reviewed with counsel before launch.

Professional services: a consultancy or law firm rarely needs more than an overview, two or three service descriptions, the team page for the people who will actually work with Korean clients, and a contact page that states the response language. Thought-leadership articles are a second phase.

What to leave out, and what not to remove

Leave out of the first scope: login-only account screens, checkout and payment flows that you have not implemented in Korean, expired promotions, job postings, the blog archive, and internal documentation. None of them inform the first decision, and each one becomes an additional page to keep synchronized.

Do not remove company identity and terms information while trimming. Korea's Act on Consumer Protection in Electronic Commerce requires operators of an online mall to display items including 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 of the goods, price and payment method, withdrawal and refund conditions and related terms (Article 13(2)) (Korean statute text checked at the National Law Information Center, 2026-09-16). Whether and how these provisions apply to a foreign company selling into Korea is a question for your counsel; the practical point is that Korean readers are used to seeing this block at the bottom of a commercial page, and a Korean page that omits it reads as incomplete.

Decide what stays untranslated. Brand names, product names, and proper nouns in addresses are usually kept in Latin script or transliterated rather than translated. Write the decision down once; otherwise each page will handle it differently.

Formatting decisions to make once, before translation

Dates: The W3C internationalization guidance notes that numeric dates such as 04/02/2020 are read differently by region and recommends the ISO 8601 form YYYY-MM-DD or writing the month as a word with a four-digit year (checked 2026-09-16). Apply this to seasonal pricing periods, cancellation deadlines and promotion end dates.

Currency: If you bill in USD or EUR, keep the currency code visible next to every Korean price and say so in words. Do not publish a converted KRW figure unless you actually charge that amount; exchange rates move daily and a fixed conversion becomes wrong quickly. If you do offer KRW billing, state it near the price and in the checkout handoff note.

Tax: State whether displayed prices include tax. Korean readers will look for this line on any price table.

Addresses and postal codes: Korea moved to a five-digit postal code system on 2015-08-01, replacing the earlier six-digit codes (Korean government notice checked 2026-09-16). If your Korean page asks for a shipping or billing address, the form must accept five digits. If you show your own address, Korean readers expect the international format with the country name.

Line breaks in Korean text: The W3C Requirements for Hangul Text Layout state that Korean lines may break either between characters or between words, and the choice is left to the document. On the web, character-based breaking can split a word across lines in a way that reads awkwardly, so check how headings and button labels wrap at phone width and ask your Korean reviewer whether the breaks are acceptable.

The source-of-truth sheet

For each page in scope, record one line with these five fields. The sheet is both the brief for whoever produces the Korean page and the reference for every later update.

Source URL — the full working address, not a menu label.
Block — overview, offer, price and conditions, or next step.
Facts approved for Korea — availability, currency, support language, anything that differs from the source page.
Fact owner and check date — a named person and the date they confirmed the facts, written as YYYY-MM-DD.
Handoff — where the reader goes next, in which language, and how that transition is labeled on the Korean page.

If the sheet runs well past eight lines, the first scope is too broad. Rather than deleting rows, mark them as phase two and revisit after the first month of Korean traffic and enquiries.

Localize the handoff, not just the explanation

A Korean introduction that ends at an unexplained English checkout creates a new point of confusion exactly where the reader is ready to act. Follow every button on the Korean page to its destination. Where the destination is English, say so on the Korean page before the click: the language of the form, the language of the sales call, the currency used at payment. Only describe a Korean booking or payment flow if you have built and tested one.

Korean readers also expect a plain description before a slogan. Marketing lines that work in English often depend on wordplay or category knowledge that does not carry over. Give the translator a one-sentence literal description of what the product does and who uses it, and let the Korean page lead with that.

Review on a phone before approving

Google states that it uses the mobile version of a site's content, crawled with the smartphone agent, for indexing and ranking, and recommends that mobile and desktop versions carry the same content and structured data (checked 2026-09-16). Review the Korean page at phone width first: heading wraps, button labels, numbers in tables, and whether the contact action is reachable without horizontal scrolling.

Then ask a Korean-speaking reviewer who knows the product to explain the offer back to you using only the page. If they cannot name the customer, the deliverable, the price conditions and the next step, revise before adding pages. Approve a specific version and record which source facts it reflects.

How Foliroom fits

Foliroom produces public pages in a target language from an existing website through an operator-managed workflow: you submit the source URL and the requested language, review the result, request corrections, and approve publication. Korean can be the target language for a non-Korean source site, and the first deliverable is a shareable page rather than a rebuilt application. Login-only screens, checkout replication, automatic detection of source changes and automatic website integration are outside the current workflow. Foliroom's website, sign-up and customer workspace are available in English, Japanese and Korean.

Korean website localization: which pages to launch first