JW Korean Branch Mistranslates New Blood Policy Update

The Korean branch of Jehovah's Witnesses mistranslated Governing Body Update number six, the update that reverses the organization's blood policy. The question is whether that happened by accident or on purpose. I went to jw.org's own server records to find out, and the evidence points in a pretty clear direction.

I was born and raised a Jehovah's Witness, spent 40 years in, and have been out for about nine years. In that time I've seen plenty of reactions to incidents like this — some overblown, some spot-on. There is, for example, an actual congregation that rejected a governing body update that allowed women to wear pants and let disfellowshipped people be greeted at the Kingdom Hall. Branches and even individual congregations going off-script does happen. So I downloaded both Korean versions of this update while they were still on jw.org's servers, transcribed the audio, and checked the same video in nine other languages to see whether Korea's version was a routine translation slip or something else.

What the September 18 Update Actually Changed

Here is Governing Body member Geoffrey Jackson summing up the new rule in English:

Brothers and sisters, we know this is a lot of information for you to take in. But what's the main point? Jehovah's Witnesses don't accept transfusions of whole blood. Nor do we donate whole blood to be transfused to others. We also don't eat blood or unbled meat. However, whether to accept components or fractions derived from another person's blood is a decision for each Christian to make.

On September 18th, the Governing Body effectively allowed most blood transfusions for Jehovah's Witnesses by making the four main components of blood — red cells, white cells, plasma, and platelets — a matter of personal decision. Whole blood itself is still off-limits, but in wealthier nations whole blood is rarely used in transfusions anyway. This wasn't a dusty paper doctrine change; lives have been lost under the previous no-blood policy, including children's lives. Witnesses carry a medical directive card, the "no blood card," instructing hospitals that transfusions of the now-allowed components were not to be used under any circumstances, even if it meant the patient's death.

The entire substance of the change lives in two phrases: the word "whole" in "whole blood," and the phrase "another person's." The update makes clear that accepting components donated from another person — something strictly forbidden before, on pain of being disfellowshipped and shunned — is now allowed. "We don't accept transfusions of whole blood" leaves the door open for those components. "We don't accept blood transfusions," which is what the Korean translation initially said, does not.

"Components from another person's blood are your decision" is the real news here, because six months earlier a different Governing Body member, Gerrit Lösch, had already announced that using your own stored blood was a personal choice. Strip out the phrase "another person's," and the September update sounds like nothing new happened at all.

Why Two Words Mattered So Much in Korean

Here is that same segment as it initially appeared in Korean. Notice the difference: it said Jehovah's Witnesses do not accept blood transfusions, full stop. That mistranslation caused an immediate stir in the ex-JW community. A PIMO (physically in, mentally out) Witness in Korea posted about it to Reddit under the title:

The Korea branch of Jehovah's Witnesses has apostatized.

In Korean, the word "suhyul" means transfusion — a red-cell transfusion is suhyul, a platelet transfusion is suhyul. So when a Korean Witness hears "we don't accept suhyul" and then hears "components are your decision," the two sentences contradict each other. English avoids that contradiction by adding "whole" to make the phrase "whole blood." The same thing happened with blood donation: the Korean summary said Witnesses don't do "honhyul," the Korean word for donating blood, which covers giving plasma and platelets too. Then, in the same summary, it said donating components is your decision. In English, the only donation ruled out is whole blood donation.

Tracing the Timeline on jw.org's Own Servers

Every step below comes from jw.org's own server file records, except the Reddit post, which carries its own timestamp.

Governing Body Update number six went out on September 18th, initially only in English — something Jackson notes at the start of the video. The other languages followed later, from about nine hours for the German dub to about four days for Russian. That delay is unusual and suggests the update was rushed.

The Korean version went up on September 21st, just after 5:00 p.m. local Korean time. About four hours later, the Reddit post went up. One hour and 48 minutes after that post, every file for the Korean video on jw.org was replaced — all four video sizes and the subtitle file swapped out for a new version. Normally that's standard Watch Tower practice for scrubbing evidence; the organization has a long track record of revising what it wrote or said to make it look like it never said it. But this time, for whatever reason, the original files were left on the server. I downloaded them immediately in case they disappeared. As of the time of this writing, they're still there.

A Patch Job, Not a Full Correction

In the revised version, six lines were changed. They added the Korean word for "whole blood" — a word that doesn't appear at all in the original translation. In the replacement, it appears six times, exactly as many times as the English says "whole." The subtitles were fixed and the audio was re-recorded, but not entirely — only the modified parts. Running the soundtracks through a transcription tool that gives Korean timestamps shows they spliced pieces in rather than re-recording the whole thing. It was a patch job.

They didn't fix everything. The phrase "another person's blood" is still missing from the announcement. In English, Jackson says:

The Governing Body has decided that the same principle applies to the four primary components of whole blood... that are derived from another person's blood.

In Korean, it says the Governing Body concluded that the same principle applies to the four main components — full stop. The part about those components coming from another person's blood isn't there.

There's a second uncorrected mistranslation. In English, Jackson says the old blood position "has protected Jehovah's people." In Korean, that became "this command has protected Jehovah's people" — not "position," but "command." An organizational interpretation was turned into an order from God, and that wasn't fixed either. So the original Korean version was missing both phrases that make the change a change, and the correction only restored one of them.

Testing the "Just a Hard Translation" Theory

Since I don't speak Korean, my first thought was that maybe "whole blood" or "another person's blood" simply don't translate cleanly into Korean. So I checked Watch Tower's own Korean-language online library. Both phrases turn out to be common and well-established.

"Whole blood" appears in the library dozens of times. The Watch Tower from June 15th, 2000, which forbade using the four major blood components, says:

Today, most transfusions are not of whole blood, but of one of its primary components.

The Korean edition uses exactly the word the update's translators left out — it's been in print for 26 years. "Another person's blood" appears dozens of times too, going back to a Watch Tower from March 1989 that draws the same distinction this update depends on: blood from another person versus the patient's own blood. That's 37 years in Korean. The phrase "our position" shows up over 100 times, including "our position on blood."

The written article accompanying the update, published in Korean on jw.org, actually does say "whole blood" every time the English does, and it does say "another person's whole blood" right where the change is announced. It uses the ordinary word for "position" twice elsewhere. But at the exact line about the old position protecting Jehovah's people, that article also switches to "command." The video to be played in Korean congregations in early October has the same pattern: no "another person's whole blood," and "command" instead of "position." This isn't a hard translation problem. It was a choice.

Was This Normal Practice?

Swapping a video out after release isn't unusual by itself — Japan, Germany, and Portugal all replaced their versions of the same video after posting it. I transcribed both versions of each. In all three, not one spoken word changed. Korea's replacement is the only one that changed what was actually said, and every change was about blood.

I also compared the Korean translation against nine other languages: Japanese, both forms of Chinese, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, and Russian. Several of them trimmed "whole" in places where it was purely descriptive, like "the components of blood" instead of "the components of whole blood" — a fair simplification. But none of them changed the meaning the way the initial Korean version did, and none dropped it from the rule itself. All nine say Witnesses don't accept transfusions of whole blood. All nine keep "another person's blood" when the change is announced. Korea is the only one that didn't. The Chinese version goes even further than the English, stating that whether it's your own blood or someone else's, the same principle applies. And Korea is the only language that turned "position" into "command" — as of this writing, that's still true in the written Korean article on jw.org.

Korea's Track Record With Other Updates

I also checked how the Korean branch handled other recent Governing Body updates: the beard change in December 2023 — exactly the kind of change you'd expect a conservative culture to resist — the update allowing disfellowshipped people to be greeted, and the update permitting Witnesses to store and use their own blood. All three came out in Korean the same day as the English version, which is standard practice, and all three, as they read today, say exactly what the English says. On the update about using one's own blood, the Korean version was actually franker than the English — where English called it a "clarification," Korean called it an "adjustment."

So on other, similar doctrinal changes, the Korean branch kept the wording almost exactly in line with the English, with no meaningful edits I could find. But this update, the one making red cells and platelets acceptable, was modified in a way that makes it harder to understand what Witnesses are now allowed to do.

Did the Korean Branch Go Rogue?

I can't say for certain what the motive was — I wasn't in the room where the decision was made, and even if I had been, I don't speak Korean. What the translation choices show is this: even the initial Korean translation said blood components are each Christian's decision, so technically it didn't cancel the change. But the summary put "we don't accept transfusions" first, in a language where that word covers the components too, making it sound like no transfusion is acceptable at all. The summary is the part people are most likely to remember. It didn't cancel the change — it buried it.

It's not that the Korean language couldn't support an accurate translation. It clearly can. The branch simply chose not to use it, and even after going back to fix part of the error, still left "another person's blood" out.

One Korean poster on Reddit described it this way:

A lot of members there are older and many of them don't really know what a blood component or fraction is. What they take away is that nothing has changed. Transfusions are still not allowed.

One possibility is that this was done to muddy a change likely to cause outrage among Korean Witnesses. It's also worth considering the process a dubbed update like this goes through before it's posted: translation, review, an approved script, voice recording, subtitling, and publication. It isn't one person's decision tossed online — a bad translation would be a real liability, which means whatever went up was scrutinized closely. So other explanations are equally possible: maybe reviewers couldn't bring themselves to believe the English meant what it said, maybe they disagreed with it, maybe they softened it on purpose for a membership that has believed the old rule their whole lives, or maybe they published something they thought wasn't fully settled and expected a clarification to follow. What seems very unlikely is that this was simply an accident. It had to be scripted, reviewed, approved, and posted on purpose.

The Most Devoted Branch

It's worth noting which branch this happened in. By Watch Tower's own numbers, South Korea has the highest pioneer rate of any country with a significant Witness population — 52% of publishers there are pioneers, full-time ministers, almost three times the worldwide average of about 19%. Nine other languages translated the update without dropping or masking the main point. The one that did is arguably the most devoted branch in the organization.

And the correction was never complete. The original, uncorrected version was live for about six hours. As of this writing, the Korean written article still reads "this command has protected Jehovah's people" instead of "this position," and its main point still doesn't say "another person's blood."

As a Jehovah's Witness, I was proud of the idea that every Witness and every Kingdom Hall was taught the same thing — that we were united in one mind and one form of worship. What the record shows here is that what one branch decided to publish was significantly different from what came out of headquarters in English, and weeks later, it still is.