Why are Netflix K-Dramas Thriving?: A South Korean High-Schooler’s opinion
Starting with the movie Parasite that won 4 Oscars, the South Korean films are a global boom nowadays. The show that anybody knows, Squid Game has claimed the No.1 position for the most days ever on Netflix’s most popular TV show ranking. The recently released show All of Us Are Dead has topped in 91 countries and recorded an astounding 124.79 million hours viewed just in the first week, Jan 24–30. Although Squid Game holds the all-time record of 1.65 billion hours in total, the first week recorded 63.2 million hours. According to reports, South Korea has risen to be the No.2 supplier of popular content on Netflix in the last quarter of 2021. The country has been on a march up the charts regardless of the megahit show.
Why are these popular content produced in South Korea? As an ordinary high schooler in South Korea, I came to deeply question these patterns and trends. While experts tried to examine all these qualities of the content and the plot twists that added a “feeling of suspense”, I focused more on the acting and the plain language itself.
Korean is a very unique language. One can learn to perfectly read every letter and word in less than an hour, but there’s much more to it in practical usages. Funny enough, although the entire nation is about 1.5 times smaller than Florida, there are multiple dialects that have originated from different provinces. Though it’s the same sentence, each dialect has a different way of reading it, and Korean people make lots of jokes about it. Because every Korean is naturally born with the capability to interpret(and manipulate) the vibe that each accent and tone gives off, this makes it much easier for the actors to fully convey their emotions. Although the translations are only able to deliver literal meanings of the lines, foreign viewers could easily pick up the hidden meanings or implied messages through the tone and the facial expressions, and I think this is one of the factors that led to the shows’ success.
While I was watching these K-dramas, I got curious about how all these “Korean” expressions were translated, the expressions that only Koreans could understand because it’s an idiom or related to history. So I watched them with English subtitles on. Translation indeed plays a crucial role in the show. Very many lines were mistranslated, including the famously known “Green light, red light” on Squid Game. Well, this might be overcriticism, but I felt like this translation was totally wrong. What the Korean voice actually says is quite lame: 무궁화 꽃이 피었습니다. This literally means “A hibiscus has bloomed.” Nobody knows who first started saying that, but this is a traditional game well known by every Korean citizen. As a Korean viewer, the childish voice repeating these simple words was a huge fear in the show for me. Changing this into a “Green light, red light” made this game into a boring crosswalk. Of course, the translators would have thought really hard to find the adequate phrase for the huge machine doll to say. But I think that international viewers would enjoy K-dramas much more if the subtitles could convey the whole context of each phrase. Another shocking fact: the show All of Us Are Dead, its actual title in Korean is 지금 우리 학교는, which literally means “Our School Right Now”. So they completely changed the title when translating into English, giving it a more gloomy pessimism and pushing the viewers to imagine a tragic ending.
Though numerous factors determine the show’s success, I thought that K-dramas are an interesting subject to take a closer look at. Thank you for reading!
