Korea’s government is funding translation support for roughly 40 domestic web novel publishers and platforms in 2026, offering up to 15 million won in reimbursed costs per company, an initiative aimed at helping the format expand into international markets even as domestic web novel readership shows signs of plateauing.
The subsidy targets one of the more persistent bottlenecks in exporting Korean web novels: unlike webtoons, whose primarily visual storytelling can translate relatively efficiently across languages, web novels are text-heavy and idiom-dependent, making professional translation both more expensive and more essential to preserving the tone and readability that made a given story popular with Korean readers in the first place.
The funding push comes as domestic web novel platforms report a genuinely mixed picture: Naver’s Series platform has grown its lead over rival Kakao Page, whose user base has declined, suggesting the domestic market overall is consolidating around fewer winners even as the format’s role as source material for webtoon, drama and film adaptations continues to grow in importance and financial value.
For the roughly 40 companies receiving support, successful translation and overseas licensing offers a path to revenue growth that does not depend on capturing a larger share of an increasingly saturated domestic reader base, instead tapping into the same rising overseas appetite for Korean serialized fiction that has already fueled the country’s webtoon export boom in markets like Japan and North America.
Source: Korea Publication Ethics Commission / KPIPA program materials, “2026 Publishing Industry Growth Engine (Web Novel Industry Support),” 2026.
