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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/37559
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/37559
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

You don't try to be accurate, you anglicize it. If you are writing in English about a Korean family, the reader expects you to translate dialogue into understandable English that is not awkward.

> If the speaker is male, then his older brother is 형. If the speaker is female, then her older brother is 오빠.

But doesn't a Korean boy/girl do this automatically without thinking about it? If so, why should the English reader be forced to think about it? As you say, it sounds weird, and just like a real translator would do, you translate into what an English reader would be comfortable with: "Hi brother", with none of the nuance indicated by language _that makes no difference to the story._

If it does matter to the story, _show_ it, don't _tell_ it. Find a scene to indicate it separately. Say this girl is a young homosexual and speaks as a male, her brother can kick back:

> "Do not speak in the male accent. You are going to get yourself beaten bloody someday."  
> Ha-yoon said, intentionally using the male accent, "By you, brother?"  
> "No, I would protect you, as I do now, little flower. I am not the only person with ears."

Accuracy is not the goal of fiction. Fictional dialogue looks and sounds nothing like real-life dialogue when it is transcribed from tape verbatim, with all its non-word verbalizations and weird pauses and self-interruptions.

What you write must serve the _story_, nothing else, and you leave out "accuracy" that does nothing to advance the story. Certain aspects of Korean culture will undoubtedly influence the plot, but it seems unlikely these relationship tags do that very often. If they do, then devise a scene (like above) in which the English speaker is made aware of (what is to them) a strange cultural quirk that matters.

Original score: 21