At the White House on Monday, during the summit between South Korea and the United States, a familiar face returned: Lee Yun-hyang, one of Washington’s most trusted Korean interpreters.
Lee, who directs the State Department’s Office of Language Services, is a graduate of Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul and has been with the department since the early 2000s.
In Washington, she is widely known simply as Dr. Lee.
She first gained international attention during US President Donald Trump’s first term, when she interpreted at his high-stakes meetings with Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader. She also stood at Trump’s side in Singapore in June 2018, in Hanoi in February 2019, and again at Panmunjom later that year, serving as his voice and ears.
Reflecting on those experiences, in a discussion hosted by the Korea Economic Institute last year, she called them “astonishing, exhilarating and almost unreal.”
Over more than two decades, Lee has also interpreted for Presidents Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr., along with a long list of senior US officials.
In a video released by the State Department in 2022, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken praised Lee and her colleagues as “the most amazing team, (without whom) we could not do our work.”
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