A dedicated civil servant with foreign-language skills has been assigned to handle key services — from residence-change filings to registration certificates — in one place, with multilingual form assistance and AI-powered real-time interpretation also available.
Seongdong-gu in Seoul has designated a dedicated service window for foreign residents on the first floor of the Yongdap-dong Community Service Center, aiming to lower the language barriers foreign residents face when handling administrative matters.
According to statistics released by the Ministry of Statistics in 2025, the number of foreign residents nationwide reached about 2.58 million — 5 percent of the total population — a record high. The number of registered foreigners in Seongdong-gu has risen about 41 percent over the past five years, with Yongdap-dong seeing particularly sharp growth, from about 480 to 820 — a 70.8 percent increase. Foreign residents now make up about 7.1 percent of Yongdap-dong's population, a share that has grown alongside an influx of international students from nearby Hanyang University and foreign workers, driving up demand for administrative services.
In response, the district set up the dedicated window in Yongdap-dong so that foreign residents can handle key civil service matters in one place. A civil servant with at least one year of experience in civil affairs and the ability to communicate in a foreign language has been assigned to the counter, and bilingual signage in Korean and English has been installed to help foreign residents find and use the window easily.
The window serves registered foreigners, overseas Koreans and multicultural families, offering foreign national seal registration and issuance, residence-change filings, and issuance of foreign registration certificates and entry and exit records.
Staff provide one-on-one assistance filling out multilingual civil service forms, and generative AI handles real-time interpretation to ease the language burden. Staff also guide residents through administrative procedures for everyday life — including birth and marriage registration and welfare support for multicultural families — to help foreign residents settle into the community.
Yongdap-dong plans to publicize the window through the community service center's website and local organizations, and will monitor usage and resident satisfaction to continuously improve services for foreign residents.
Seongdong-gu District Mayor Yoo Bo-hwa said the district would work to ensure that no one faces difficulty accessing administrative services because of language or cultural differences. "We will listen carefully to the diverse voices of our residents and keep improving the administrative service environment so that everyone can use it with ease," she said.
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