Danish to Korean: respect for the listener and respect for the person discussed are separate choices
Danish De identifies the addressee, not every person mentioned
Sproget.dk lists Danish du and polite De among second-person pronouns, while han and hun refer to people in the third person. Before translating a message into Korean, distinguish the person receiving it from the person whose actions it describes. They may be different people with different relationships to the writer.
A Danish note addressed respectfully to a visitor might discuss a colleague, while a casual message to a friend might discuss a respected teacher. The source’s choice of address does not alone tell you how every third person should be referred to in Korean.
Map those relationships separately: writer to recipient, and writer to the person being discussed. This prevents a translation from treating the whole sentence as uniformly formal or informal merely because one Danish pronoun appears.
Korean grammar distinguishes subject honorification from listener politeness
The National Institute of Korean Language’s introductory account distinguishes -(으)시- for the person represented as the subject from endings such as -습니다 and -요 relating to the listener. These grammatical resources can contribute different kinds of respect within the same statement.
Its basic dictionary likewise defines -시- through subject honorification. It also documents an indirect use where the grammatical subject is a possession or body part associated with the respected person. That qualification is another reason to inspect the complete construction instead of searching only for a person’s name immediately before the verb.
The grammatical distinction does not provide a universal social formula based only on age or job title. Use the actual relationship, setting and intended voice, rather than importing every historical social prescription from a teaching description into a present-day message.
A forwarded update can change its audience without changing its subject
Imagine a Danish student telling a close friend that a teacher has arrived. The teacher is the person discussed; the friend is the listener. A Korean translation should not assume that familiarity with the friend removes every reason to use respectful reference to the teacher.
Now imagine the same information being sent to an unfamiliar administrator. The audience has changed, while the teacher and arrival event remain the same. Review the listener-facing style without silently changing who arrived or treating the administrator as the subject of the report.
A reply may then discuss the student’s own arrival. That changes the subject too. Do not carry every respect marker from the teacher’s sentence into the student’s self-description simply because both statements occur in one polite exchange. The roles have to be traced sentence by sentence.
If the Danish text uses De, check that it is actually second-person address. Capitalisation at the beginning of a sentence can obscure the distinction from third-person plural de. Establish whether the source addresses the reader or describes a group before selecting the Korean references.
Finally, review the message as an interaction rather than a list of polite words. Who speaks, who receives the message and whose action is reported? Keeping those roles distinct lets the Korean version preserve courtesy without changing the participants or applying one undifferentiated level of respect to everybody mentioned.
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