What does the -기는 하다 grammar signify in this sentence?

Question

My language book has the following conversation (excerpt):

• 모레까지 꼭 해야 하는데.
• 친구 중에 번역을 많이 해 본 친구가 있기는 해. 소개해 줄까?

I'd assume the somewhat literal translation of the relevant sentence would be: "Between my friends there's one who has a lot of experience translating."

What I don't understand is how the -기는 하다 grammar alters the meaning here. The explanations for this grammar I've found online (contrasting a second sentence, while acknowledging a first one) don't make much sense to me in this context. Is the urgency (conveyed by the first speaker) being acknowledged here? How would you translate this into English (or perhaps German or Hungarian)?

To phrase the question more generally: what does this grammar mean if there's no contrasting sentence to follow it up?

Answer 1

Although @user17915 already confirmed in a comment that your assumption is basically correct, I'll try to add a little more based on my experience.

First two comments:

• In common usage you will more often see/hear ~기는 in the contracted form ~긴.
• You will also see this construction but with the original verb repeated instead of 하다. In your example, this would be "있기는 있다" or "있긴 있다."

Although the literal meaning is the same, to me, this form puts some more emphasis on the fact that the statement is in fact true or does in fact happen. As a native English speaker I might express it this way: "I do have a friend who has a lot of translation experience," rather that just a straight "I have a friend who has a lot of translation experience."

In this example there's no contrasting statement, but the same concept works well when there is a contrasting statement. For example: "그 신발 예쁘긴 한데 너무 비싸다." = "Although those shoes are pretty, they're too expensive."

Edit to contrast with the ending ~지

I realized that without hearing voice tone, the English examples I wrote could also sound more like the Korean ~지, which is used to definitively confirm something (in a declarative sentence). In my shoe example we could have something like

"네 신발 예쁜데 비쌌나?" "비쌌지!"

"Your shoes are pretty. Were they expensive?" "Yeah they (definitely) were!"

This use of ~지 would not typically be followed by a contrasting statement.