I’m a freelance translator of Korean nationality with a background in English-Korean Translation and Interpretation. Translation has always fascinated me — not just the transfer of meaning, but the negotiation of everything that resists it.
This blog started from a recurring frustration: many Korean songs I’ve come across do have English translations, but they often read as though the translator stopped at the dictionary — or worse, as though no translator was involved at all. The words are there, but the weight behind them isn’t.
My approach is to stay as close to the original Korean as possible, while making sure the English carries the same emotional weight — not just the meaning, but the feeling behind it. Korean lyrics can be dense with nuance: a simple word like ‘설레임’ captures a particular flutter of anticipation that doesn’t map neatly onto English. When that happens, I try to explain it rather than paper over it.
My focus is mainly on older Korean music — songs from the 80s through the 2010s that I find myself returning to. Not because they’re necessarily better than anything else, but because they’re the ones I know well enough to care about getting right. That said, newer songs will find their way in too, whenever something feels worth the effort.
This is, at its heart, a blog for translation — but language has a way of drawing you in further than you expect. If this blog helps even a few readers find their way a little deeper into the language, that is all the satisfaction I need.
Translations are rarely definitive, and I don’t claim mine are. If you have a different reading, a correction, or simply a question about a particular line, I’d be glad to hear it. I can be reached at as144111@gmail.com