Why is the same Korean name spelled two ways?

You start a Korean novel in one translation and finish it in another, and the hero has changed his name on the way. He was Kim Jin-woo; now he's Gim Jinu, or Kim Jinwoo, or Jin Woo Kim. Korean name romanization is the reason, and it's less a system than three systems and a great many personal habits fighting over the same syllables.

What's actually going on

Korean is written in hangul, an alphabet, so every name has one fixed spelling in Korean and no fixed spelling in Latin letters. Turning 김진우 into English means picking a scheme, and there are two official ones with a long history between them. The older academic scheme, used through most of the twentieth century, spells by sound and uses apostrophes and diacritics; the government's Revised Romanization, adopted in 2000, spells by letter and uses neither. Under the old scheme 김 is Kim. Under the new one it's Gim. And under the habit of nearly every actual Korean named Kim, it's Kim, because surnames were being written in English long before either scheme existed and families kept what they had.

So the surnames come with a customary spelling that ignores the rules: Kim, Lee, Park, Choi, Jung, where the 2000 system would give Gim, I, Bak, Choe, Jeong. Given names have no such custom, and that's where the variety lives. 진우 can be Jinwoo, Jin-woo, Jin Woo, Jinu or Jin-u depending on scheme, hyphen policy and the translator's ear.

What the choices mean

To a Korean reader none of this is visible; the name is 김진우 and always was. To an English reader the spelling carries accidental signals. Hyphenated given names look older and more formal. Run-together ones look modern and read faster. Gim and Bak look correct to a linguist and wrong to almost everyone else, because the surnames people know from the news and from film are the customary ones. Name order is the other landmine: Korean puts the family name first, and translations either keep that, Kim Jinwoo, or flip it for English readers, Jinwoo Kim, and the flip makes every character sound like they emigrated.

There's also the matter of what a name sounds like. 이 is written Lee by custom and Yi by system, and the Korean pronunciation is closer to the second; 박 is Park by custom and there's no r in it at all. Customary spellings are historical accidents that stuck, which is a fine reason to keep them and a poor reason to think they're accurate.

How translators handle it

Most current licensed editions use customary surnames plus the modern system for given names, run together: Kim Jinwoo, Lee Dokja, Park Sujin. It's the easiest to read, and its only cost is inconsistency at the seams, since the surname and given name follow different rules.

A few use the government system throughout: Gim Jinu, I Dokja. It's consistent and it's honest, and readers hate it, because it makes every character look misspelled.

Then there's the hyphen: Kim Jin-woo. It shows the syllable boundary, which helps with names like 진아 that can be read two ways, and it looks the most like the Korean names English readers already know. Its cost is that it's slower on the page and a little dated.

What we'd choose

Customary surnames, given names in the modern system, family name first, no hyphen, and the same choice for every character from the first chapter to the last. Which scheme matters less than the rule that a name is how a reader recognizes a person, and a character whose spelling drifts between chapters reads as two people. We'd also keep the Korean name order, because flipping it is the one choice that changes what the name means rather than how it looks.

How to read it comfortably

If a name in a new translation looks unfamiliar, say it out loud; Gim and Kim, Jinu and Jinwoo are the same sounds in different clothes. Assume the first word is the family name unless the book tells you otherwise, and don't read anything into a hyphen. All you need is a book that spells everyone one way, all the way through. Find one that does and read it in Crossleaf.