I've seen people asking if Naver Map has an English version to use on your desktop PC. You probably already know that the app version of Naver Map can be set to either Korean, English, Chinese, or Japanese. This will affect not only the interface of the app, but the names of places listed on the map tile images themselves. But what about on the desktop web version?
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| English version of Cheongwadae listing on Naver Map |
Background
There was apparently an attempt (six years ago now...) to bring the same level of multi-lingual functionality to the desktop version of Naver Map too, which I wrote about here:
Naver Map testing beta service for multi-language web interface
It seems like that idea was abandoned. Perhaps because they figured most tourists/visitors (i.e. people who can't read Korean) would be using the phone app anyway so it was pointless to invest in making this work on the desktop too.
Mobile web version
But actually, if you simply use the mobile web interface (https://m.map.naver.com) on your desktop PC, you can get some of the same multilingual features from the app right on your PC, including being logged in to your Naver account for easier access to and editing of your saved locations, etc.
Now at first you will just see the blank Korean map, like this:
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| Naver Maps mobile web version |
But try searching for a place first. For example, I just typed in "Blue House" (in English) and in the results it returned the correct Korean listing for 청와대.
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| Searching on Naver Maps mobile version |
Language chooser button
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| Multilingual button |
Click it, and sure enough, you can choose among that same set of 4 languages:
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| Language options for Naver Map |
Choosing the English option renders most of the page interface, including the name of the location (청와대 gets transliterated as Cheongwadae). And now you can see most of the page's features in English:
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| "English" version of Cheongwadae listing on Naver Map |
Most of those screenshots I was showing were from the mobile site on a mobile device, but you can see that this works fine on a desktop PC too:
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| How Naver Map mobile web version looks on PC |
This 80% multilingual approach mimics as far as I can tell exactly what you see in the in-app experience, so I'm guessing that setting your app language essentially makes this selection for you on your device and pulls content from this mobile web version. That makes sense: maintaining that mobile web version lets the app be basically a wrapper to help ensure the same experiences across devices and ecosystems.
Try this yourself to see the language chooser button:
https://m.place.naver.com/place/1131579554/home
Limitation: no effect on map imagery tiles
One big limitation with this approach is that it seems to only apply to actual place entries (on the m.place.naver.com domain). So the map tiles imagery themselves are still in Korean. This makes it less than ideal for browsing/exploring in English on the desktop.
For example the location saving is still in Korean language though, just as it is in the "English" settings of the app:
I'm not going to lie: this is not super useful. Some things get translated, some don't.
Bear in mind that images like this are being (partially) translated on the Naver side:
This could be nice then when, for example, you aren't on Chrome and using its frankly more convenient auto-translation.
Verdict
So overall, I honestly don't think this is very useful. You're better off just letting Chrome auto-translate these pages for you.
You can see in my old post from 2018 how the actual English map imagery was accessible on desktop. It doesn't seem like they have any interest in bringing that back to desktop. Sorry folks. Just stick with the app.
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