#like sorry but Jinyoung yelling at that spaceship captain in distress creates such a harsh dissonance to the actual mood

[catboy-jaebeom]

not to be a nerd on main about this, but we should stop transcribing 형 / 누나 and 오빠* / 언니 as bro / sis. linguistically they have very different connotations and it's kinda driving me up a wall as someone who's very invested and interested in languages, like, I do realize that especially casual watchers of like kdramas, who just started getting into them after Netflix or whomever added a bunch of them to their library, don't really care and that's totally fine with me! it's a considerably small thing, and if you just wanna watch something without diving into the language or culture or anything, then you're totally free to, that's valid, honestly

just. that's not what those words mean, connotation-wise and every time I read "bro!" or "sis!" in Netflix's or even YT's subtitles I die a bit inside.

obviously I'm not Korean and if anyone who speaks the language well / lives in Korea and is well familiar with when those are used, wants to weigh in, feel absolutely free to!

but to break it down briefly, those are honorifics attached to a person's name if they're older than you, but not, like, significantly. older students, older colleagues at work if you're a bit more friendly with them, friends, and ( your actual ) siblings. they are normal and do not immediately imply you view the other person as a sort of sibling from another parent.

yes, they do basically translate to "older brother" / "older sister", but transcribing it with "bro" and "sis" respectively has an entirely different impact than what they are actually supposed to infer. it's a polite suffix, that can in certain situations also imply trust or a more intimate relationship, because otherwise ( especially outside of a school context ) you'd use 씨 ( shee ) after their name. just that nobody especially in a school context does that because they use 형 ( hyeong / hyung ) / 누나 ( noona ) and 오빠* ( oppa ) / 언니 ( eonnie / unnie ) — former is used by males and latter by females, both times to address an older 'brother' / an older 'sister' respectively — either alone or after their name.

the companion piece is adding 아 or 야 (-a for names with a consonant at the end or -ya for those with a vowel ) to the names of people younger than you ( or those you're close with ) — and for example in All Of Us Are Dead they do that all the time and it's not transcribed by cutesy-fying their names is it now. they just put their names into the subtitles and move on.

I personally think it'd be much better to simply use you in any other sentence and if some character yells 형! across the room in distress, to transcribe it with the other character's name for emphasis. that's for me personally the closest, connotation-wise.

or, you know, have hyeong / noona / eunnie / oppa* in the transcript / subtitles in italics and explain it with some translator annotation the first time it appears alone. but that's generally an issue with subtitles on such platforms I feel. they remove words when creating the subtitles and leave out such nuances because gods forbid they'd force casual viewers to pause the show to read the annotations akskdkf. either way,

tl;dr they don't use teen slang in kdramas all the time even if the subtitles would have you believe otherwise and it's probably a problem that stems from companies thinking they can't "bother" their customers with having to pause to read, but I think that's simply taking away important context to a depicted story and I'd really like it to stop, thank you.

*oppa is a bit special because it is also used as a sort of term of endearment by women towards their boyfriends, or like, when they flirt with them pre-relationship, so it can also imply a romantic interest, be mindful of that. but I'd assume then it'd be transcribed with some sort of babe or honey or something.

#bro! #hyeong! #languages #k-dramas #langblr #korean #kdramas #leafmiilk does stuff #like sorry but Jinyoung yelling at that spaceship captain in distress creates such a harsh dissonance to the actual mood #because he actually yells implying that despite titles and their different ranks #in this situation they're family and he wants him to snap out of his panic #no in the world can ever convey that wkekrkfk #it also bothers me in all of us are dead #community translations ( like on rakuten viki ) are simply superior because of this reason specifically #they assume you're familiar with such words and work with annotations otherwise #all of us are dead