[What About This Book]"'Hoobaes' Is Not a Mistranslation but a Strategy"... K-Content Must Break Free from the Obsession with "Purity"

A Provocation from British Scholar Alfred Ro
"Koreanness Is Not a Museum Relic but the Result of 'Performance'"
"The Hybridity of 'K-Pop Demon Hunters' Should Be Seen as a 'Creative Variation'"

The more the territory of K-content expands, the more intense the soul-searching around what constitutes "Koreanness" becomes. Amid a flood of content that crosses borders, a fundamental question arises as to whether the "purity" that has long been upheld is still a valid standard. Against this backdrop, a new argument is gaining traction in academia and the industry: that the essence of the Korean Wave should not be treated as a fixed original form, but reinterpreted from the perspectives of "hybridity" and "performance."

The essay "Made Separately from Korea, Yet Together with Korea" by Alfred Ro, Researcher in Linguistics and Korean Studies at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, included in the new book "Inside and Outside Perspectives on Reading the Korean Wave," offers an intriguing perspective that supports this discussion. He argues that we need to dismantle the outdated censorship device of "national authenticity," which we have been unconsciously operating, and instead view the Korean Wave through a boundary-crossing, "trans-border (Trans)" lens.

The work he analyzes is the Netflix animated film "K-Pop Demon Hunters." Although it was a global box-office success, it also drew criticism that it distorted Koreanness through a Western gaze, because American capital and staff led the production. In response, he points out that such criticism stems from a narrow view that treats language and culture as fixed entities, and he offers "translanguaging" theory as an alternative.

Stills from the Netflix animated film K-Pop Demon Hunters

According to his reading, expressions such as "Hoobaes" mixed into the English dialogue or the appearance of "Itaewon" without any particular explanation are not simply translation failures. Rather, they are closer to a strategic performance in which different linguistic resources collide and merge to create new meanings. By adding the English plural suffix (-s) to hoobae (junior), the film conveys Korea’s unique hierarchical culture, and by setting Itaewon as a space of nightlife, it elicits emotional resonance across language barriers.

This kind of "strategic hybridity" is even more pronounced in the way characters are named and written. He focuses on the naming of the idol group "Saja Boys" in the film. It is an ambivalent expression that simultaneously borrows the image of the animal "lion" (saja) and the "grim reaper" (jeoseungsaja) who guides the dead, using the polysemy of Korean to construct a uniquely K-pop worldview.

The fact that the film does not follow the norms of Romanization is also noteworthy. It spells hoobae not as the standard form "hubae," but as "hoobae," which is widely used within the global fandom. Just as overseas fans write eonni as "unni," the film prioritizes the conventions of the actual cultural consumers over state-mandated language norms. He interprets this as "evidence that Korean culture is not being unilaterally transmitted, but is being reconfigured through interaction with the fandom." This suggests that the "Koreanness" of K-content is not a fixed original, but a "participatory identity" co-created with its audience.

This perspective becomes even clearer in the visual elements. The way the character for "spicy" (辛) on a cup-ramyeon is reappropriated as the character for "spirit" or "deity" (神) and turned into a magical tool, or the scenes that mix Hangul and English on street signs in Seoul, can be read not as Orientalism but as the result of "transculturing." While reflecting the multicultural reality that contemporary Korean society is already experiencing, they serve as "creative variations" that expand Korean culture in contextually appropriate ways.

In the end, this animated film is less a work that reproduces Korea as it is, and more a product that has been reconfigured to communicate with a global audience. He argues that the old dictum "what is most Korean is what is most global" should now be transformed into "what is performed globally is what is most Korean." Koreanness, in this view, is not a fixed heritage preserved in a museum, but an organism that is modified and reassembled depending on the situation.

Netflix animated film 'K-Pop Demon Hunters' stills

"K-Pop Demon Hunters concretely reveals the instinct of translanguaging, which flexibly mobilizes diverse resources to make human communication possible, and the aspects of transculturing, in which cultural possibilities are imagined and realized in that process. (...) 'Koreanness' emerges not as a static identity that is diluted in a global environment, but as an ongoing process that is constantly renewed through complexity and interaction."

This insight challenges the double standard with which we often view Korea-themed content produced overseas. It suggests that we should move away from a defensive posture that polices "how Korean it is," and instead embrace a Koreanness that is being varied and expanded in the world. In persuasively showing that the future of the Korean Wave lies not in preserving an original prototype, but in flexible expansion and fusion, it offers significant implications for those who are thinking about the next phase of K-content.

Inside and Outside Perspectives on Reading the Korean Wave | Edited by Ahn Seungbeom, K-Culture & Story Content Research Institute | Kyung Hee University Press & Culture | 255 pages | 16,000 won