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Pyongyang rock festival to be managed from London

WoodstockI was browsing the DPRK’s Voice of Korea yesterday while writing an upcoming more flippant post. The site contains information of a rock festival in Pyongyang next year organised by the VoK. The festival is billed as “Rock for Peace” – the 2007 version of Woodstock. The story is picked up in the Guardian and the First Post.

VoK is based in New Malden, and their head, Jean-Baptiste KIM, recently did a Q&A with Guardian readers. The VoK also announced yesterday the involvement of a Brit who will be going through the website ironing out the various linguistic infelicities which are inevitable when a site is written by someone who does not have English as a first language.

2 thoughts on “Pyongyang rock festival to be managed from London

  1. A quote from Jean-Baptiste Kim, on the Guardian’s website:

    I rather prefer to trust ‘Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili’ (known as Joseph Stalin) than United Nations. The UN is the puppet of USA has nothing to do in fair politics. I am so angry about what you said ‘killing babies’ as I am a father of three little children myself. Do you think we are all monsters with many heads and snake hairs like Medusa?. We are the creatures of the holy trinity who have exactly the same conscience and the reason just like yourself. I can not believe that this kind of horrible rumours and propagandas are running around the world. This is a typical Chat & Cheat – Trick & Trial tactics of secret services in common. I do not want to be involved in their dirty games and I do not have respects on this kind of horror film.

    I don’t think any amount of “ironing out” of linguistic problems caused by having English as a third language can change the content of answers like that (or the other ones where anyone who criticised aspects of North Korean Stalinism was told they were “brainwashed” by “the CIA”).

  2. Agreed.

    What happens with me, though, pedant that I am, is that I get easily distracted. If there’s a weird or unfortunate turn of phrase I focus on the language rather than the underlying message. I think to myself, hey, these people could do with someone to do some proofreading for them. When the ironing out is done, I can think, hey, so that’s what they think – without the distraction. So I’m all for getting the ironing done: get the message out loud and clear.

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