Romanization
Romanization is the transliteration of Korean characters into English. Since the year 2000, the Korean government has been using a system called the Revised Romanization of Korean (RRK) as the basis for official signage such as traffic signs, subway station signs, and so on. The signs are generally consistent, with exceptions made in cases where a name was already established using a different system.
The names of several conglomerates and universities are examples of such exceptions. Samsung under the RRK system would be Samseong, and the latter is the spelling used for Samseong Station on Line 2 of the Seoul metro. The station is named for the neighborhood, Samseong-dong, rather than the company.
Konkuk University Station, on the other hand, retains the older spelling because it’s named for the university, which was established several decades before the RRK. Otherwise, the name would appear as Geonguk. Because of the older spelling, I almost always mispronounce the ‘eo’ as an ‘o’ and sometimes give it a hard ‘k’ sound. If instead I use the shortened name, ‘Geondae’, I’ll correctly pronounce the ‘eo’ every time.
Personal names are also excepted. Names of historical figures are spelled in the way they’re known in English language texts. For living people, the individual’s preferred spelling is typically used. Very often, these spellings use ad-hoc, phonetic spellings rather than any particular system of romanization.
Take, for example, the Korean surname ‘이’. Under the RRK system, this should be romanized as ‘I’, but I have never seen anyone do that. Most commonly today, people write it as ‘Lee’. In past decades, ‘Rhee’ was also common. Former president Syngman Rhee is a good example. Today, he might be known as Lee Seung Man. Members of the Lee clan from the Joseon Dynasty and earlier are always referred to as ‘Yi’, as that was the spelling most commonly used by the Westerners coming into Korea in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. So when you read about the ‘Yi Dynasty’, you can think ‘Lee Dynasty’.