A starting point

A Korean friend is travelling in Europe. She posted on Facebook photos of the Belvedere Palace Museum, Vienna, accompanied by an explanation obviously in Korean but Facebook showed me an auto-translation into English, which reads (minor strong language warning):

The palace where Franz Ferdinant, the Emperor of Hapsburg, Austria, lived as a fucking point of World War I due to the assassination in Sarajevo

This is obviously wrong, but where is the problem?

Her original is:

사라예보에서의 암살로 인해서 1차세계대전의 시발점이 되었던 오스트리아 합스부르크 황태자 프란츠 페르디난트가 살던 궁전

The key word is 시발점 (shi-bal-jeom), or 시발 (shi-bal) or … if you know more Korean than I do, you may know where this is heading, but it took me a while to pin down. 

Google translates the whole thing as:

The palace where Austrian Habsburg Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand lived, whose assassination in Sarajevo was the starting point of World War I. 

then 시발점 as starting point and 시발 as fuck 

Microsoft’s Bing translates it as:

The palace of Austrian Habsburg Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination in Sarajevo triggered the First World War

then 시발점 as starting point and doesn’t provide a translation for 시발.

Naver’s Papago translates it as:

the palace where Franz Ferdinand, Crown Prince of Habsburg of Austria, was the starting point of World War I because of his assassination in Sarajevo

then 시발점 as origin, starting point, trigger and 시발 as shit.

To me, Bing’s translation is the most idiomatic, probably because it’s the least literal. Note that all three correctly identify the the subject palace, add the and place it at the start of the sentence, and also render 페르디난*트* as Ferdinan*d*. Apparently 페르디난트 is the accepted spelling in Korean eg Korean Wikipedia. (I would transliterate it as 드.)

Searching the internet for 시발 found not much (but see this webtoon, which my Korean isn’t good enough to translate) and a sign at Guro station which apparently causes some amusement, but eventually led me to 씨발 (ssi-bal), which is the word Facebook’s auto-translator was getting confused about (and which hasn’t been in any textbook I’ve used). I’m puzzled about why, when 시발점 is a perfectly good word. 

Korean Wiktionary explains it at length (my browser automatically shows a translation option, which also struggles occasionally).

One word in every textbook is 십팔 (ship-pal), which means 18. I wondered whether people use that instead, and the answer is yes. 

Google Translate translates 씨발 as fuck, but then translates fuck as 못쓰게 만들다 (mot-sseu-ge man-deul-da), which is obviously different. It then translates that as make it unable to use, which is certainly a secondary meaning in English, but your chances of success will be far less if you use it in wrong context. The formal word for sexual intercourse is 성교 (seong-gyo).

See this post, where I wrote about a textbook talking about ‘four-letter words’.

PS At the back of my mind was a series of books titled How to make out in [Language], which are described as “a guide to modern colloquial [Language] for use in everyday informal interactions—giving access to the sort of catchy [Language] expressions that aren’t covered in traditional language materials”. Amazon lists Chinese, Indonesian, Thai, Korean, More Korean, Hindi, Japanese, More Japanese, Vietnamese, Burmese, Tagalog, Hindi, Arabic and English.