Naver to upgrade Korean map service for foreigners

South Korean online giant Naver Corp. is set to upgrade its digital map service for foreigners to attract more global users as the domestic market grows saturated.

Naver said on Wednesday it plans to offer a multilingual translation service for visitor reviews of restaurants, shops and more, as well as search filters for such places on its Korea mapping app.

Naver Map, which the company says provides the most comprehensive information on locations around the country, is the only local online map service provided in four languages — Korean, English, Chinese and Japanese. Its translations are powered by Papago, the company’s multilingual machine translation cloud service.

The new service will allow foreigners to read reviews by users and provide international visitors with the information necessary to search for desired places, Naver officials said. It also allows foreigners to search for restaurants according to their preferences, 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.

TO RAISE NAVER MAP MAU TO 30 MILLION

Through the new service, Naver aims to ramp up the increase in the number of foreign users of its map service. Its number of daily active foreign users rose by an average of 26.4% in September from a year earlier, according to the company.

The tech giant aims to boost the map service's monthly active users (MAU) to 30 million this year from a record high of 27.5 million in August — a hard-to-reach target only with domestic users, the company said.

It wants to coax foreigners who use Google Maps, the world's largest mapping application, in other countries, to 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 used Naver Map when visiting Korea, while 33.9% used Google Maps.

Naver Map has supported multilingual translations since Korea hosted the 2018 Winter Olympics. At the time, the service provided only basic information about places such as names, addresses and type of business.

Last year Naver resumed service upgrades, which had been delayed by the Covid-19 pandemic.

The company has added translation to other place information such as business hours, reservation information and takeout availability in the first half of this year. It also provided reviews in multiple languages.

Write to Ji-Eun Jeong at jeong@hankyung.com
 
Jongwoo Cheon edited this article.