SEOUL -- At a lecture designed to encourage interpretation school students, Vietnamese Ambassador to South Korea Nguyen Vu Tung lectured that trust between humans plays a key role in interpretation even in an era in which translator devices are gaining popularity. The ambassador interacted with students majoring in Korean-Vietnamese at a graduate school in southern Seoul.

"The ambassador told students that demands for talented human interpreters will be still high as artificial intelligence is unable to build trust with clients," Kim Jeong-hoon, a spokesperson at the International Graduate School of English, told Aju Daily on April 28. The lecture titled "Korean and Viet Nam’s Cooperation, Vision, and Mutual Language Learning" was attended by some 100 people.

"Of 57 students studying Korean-Vietnamese translation and interpretation, 57 of them are Vietnamese and only two of them are South Korean," Kim said, adding that most Vietnamese students return to their home country after graduation and prepare to work for Vietnamese branches of South Korean conglomerates.
 
The offline lecture conducted on April 28 is available on the language institute's official Facebook page.
 
According to data released by South Korea's trade ministry, Viet Nam had an estimated $34.5 billion trade deficit with South Korea in 2022. In an exclusive interview with Aju Daily, Ambassador Nguyen said that South Korea is the Southeast Asian country's largest foreign direct investment (FDI) partner with about 9,600 projects worth more than $81 billion. He said South Korean FDI firms are present in almost every province and city, and major economic sector in his country.