Translating the K-wave

A Greater Discursive View

Abstract

The Korean Wave or K-wave is often examined as a globally dispersed yet rapidly growing field of cultural consumption. When studying this phenomenon, the question of how the audience is reached despite cultural distances, different languages, and foreign sensibilities is crucial, as the meanings that the audience receives explain why the K-wave “sticks,” sometimes even through immersive empathy and sustained self identification. To this end, studies have observed fan-driven community translation efforts and the meanings that K- wave content holds for core fans. I shift this familiar focus slightly by asking the question “What does translation do to K-wave content in reverse?” This approach takes the discursive process of localization and its actors into account. This article is a first step towards proposing that studying meanings before and after translation is an overlooked theoretical building block for explaining the spread of the K-wave. Doing so can provide a deeper understanding of the successes and failures of exported cultural content and yields a higher level of control over translation outcomes, which have been subject to more moral hazard than would be ideal.