I would like to request the ability to choose from different transliteration options for Korean, much like what is already available for Japanese (a drop-down menu).
There are three standard Korean Romanization schemes, Revised, McCune-Reischauer, and Yale. The currently used scheme isn’t any of them, but a mixture. E.g. writing l for ㄹ everywhere, ‘b’ ‘d’ ‘g’ for syllable-final ㅂ ㄷ ㄱ, and syllable-final clusters by the spelling instead of pronunciation.
I’d suggest each scheme helps the learner in its own way. Revised is closest to what South Koreans actually use. MC-R resembles Revised, and looks simpler (with fewer digraphs, which are sometimes not as accessibility-friendly especially for quick subtitle-reading), provided the browser supports the display. Yale focuses on the morphology and makes grammar and many sound changes much simpler and clearer to the reader.
It’s true that none of the three can be faithfully implemented, because each has “exceptions” to the Hangeul spelling based on linguistic context (e.g. Revised marks consonant assimilations but not in personal names; Yale uses ‘q’ to write the “reinforcement” which is never written in Hangeul, so kimq pap instead of kim pap for 김밥 “Kimbap”). Automatic transliteration can’t do such linguistic analysis.
However, it should be both possible and simple to use their approximations following just the Hangeul spelling. For example, a “pseudo-Yale” scheme which never writes the reinforcement, vowel length, or pitch accent, and a “pseudo-Revised” scheme that doesn’t write administrative units and personal names differently. Creating these pseudo-schemes would be simple, because they only require some one-to-one character replacement rules sequentially implemented. E.g. for Yale, ae -> ay universally, e -> ey if not following vowels, and eo -> e universally, etc.; for Revised, b, d, g -> p, t, k if not following vowels, etc. If it is possible to output new transliterations directly from the Hangeul spelling, it would be even more straightforward. I am also willing to write the rules myself if needed (I just need the code format; or I can provide pseudo-code).
Overall the plugin is fantastic; the features I’m requesting require no new functionalities but would be extremely helpful for me and many other Korean learners.