In recent years, Korean culture has been incredibly successful internationally, from the films of auteur directors like Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) to shows like Squid Game and K-pop music. At the same time, media from the UK has also been successful in South Korea, with popular shows such as Killing Eve and Life on Mars. Written by scholars working across translation, film and media studies, this volume examines the ways in which Korean media has been received and translated in the UK, as well as how British media has fared in South Korea. Case studies explore how Korean media is (re)packaged and categorised for a Western audience and how paratextual material (trailers, adverts, fan reactions) mediates films and shows for international audiences. The book also examines how the Korean remake of Life on Mars localises the British show, how Squid Game has been audio-described and how slower media models can suggest more sustainable forms of consumption and distribution. Demonstrating how interdisciplinary research can shed light on different aspects of global media culture, this volume will be essential reading for scholars and students working on the translation and international media circulation. It will especially appeal to readers interested in the interactions between British and Korean media. Jonathan Evans is Reader in Translation Studies at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK. Jinsil Choi is Associate Professor at Tabula Rasa College, Keimyung University, South Korea. Kyung Hye Kim is Assistant Professor at Dongguk University, South Korea. Translating and Receiving Korean Media The Korean Wave in Translation series will aim to discuss issues of translation, invisibility, and the meanings of ‘K-ness’ in conjunction with the cultural phenomenon, the Korean Wave. Following the explosion of K-Wave products into the global mainstream, this series comes at an opportune moment. Though there has been study into the difficulties and nuances of translation of Korean into English, recent smash hit films, record breaking TV shows, and successful bands  – i.e. Parasite (2019), Squid Game (2021), and BTS, to name a few – demonstrate that the K-Wave is influential on such a scale that specific attention must be paid to the translation of K-Wave media. This series will consider how K-media is being translated for the global audience and how depth of meaning has thereby been limited. This study is both a linguistic and cultural study, examining the process of translation and meaning-making engendered by the ever-successful K-Wave, with specific focus on the role of consumers in crowd-sourced meaning-making. Innovative Methods in Korean Language Teaching Edited by Nicola Fraschini and Jieun Kiaer Frontiers of Translation in Korean Language Education Edited by Simon Barnes-Sadler and Jieun Kiaer Learning Korean Through Culture Intermediate-Advanced Level 1 Kyuin Kim, Boyun Kim and Hyeyung Park Translating and Receiving Korean Media From Squid Game to Life on Mars Edited by Jonathan Evans, Jinsil Choi and Kyung Hye Kim The Korean Wave in Translation Series Editor: Jieun Kiaer University of Oxford, UK www.routledge.com/languages/book-series/KWT http://www.routledge.com/languages/book-series/KWT Translating and Receiving Korean Media From Squid Game to Life on Mars Edited by Jonathan Evans, Jinsil Choi and Kyung Hye Kim First published 2025 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2025 selection and editorial matter, Jonathan Evans, Jinsil Choi and Kyung Hye Kim; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Jonathan Evans, Jinsil Choi and Kyung Hye Kim to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 International license. Any third party material in this book is not included in the OA Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. Please direct any permissions enquiries to the original rightsholder. This work was supported by the Fund for International Collaboration and the Economic and Social Research Council. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-97476-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-97935-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-59619-6 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003596196 Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC http://www.taylorfrancis.com https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003596196 List of Contributors� vii Acknowledgements� ix Introduction� 1 JONATHAN EVANS, JINSIL CHOI, AND KYUNG HYE KIM PART 1 Korean Media in the West� 13 1 Taste at the interface: streaming K-dramas in the UK� 15 ZOË SHACKLOCK 2 Making sense of streaming success: the discursive construction of Squid Game’s success by the South Korean and British media� 31 JI-HAE KANG 3 Coherence of the Korean and English audio description of Squid Game� 53 SOO-YEON SEO 4 Translation, streaming and the Korean Film Archive: toward sustainable solutions� 71 JONATHAN EVANS Contents vi  Contents PART 2 British Media in South Korea� 87 5 Paratextual repackaging and reception: reframing and promoting queer themes in Killing Eve in Korea� 89 JINSIL CHOI 6 Streaming age: fluidity of authorship and paratextual repackaging in media translation� 102 KYUNG HYE KIM 7 Local nodes in global media networks: the Korean remake of BBC’s Life on Mars� 120 HYE JEAN CHUNG Index� 136 Contributors Jinsil CHOI is Associate Professor at Tabula Rasa College, Keimyung University, Korea, and Affiliate at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, Univer- sity of Glasgow, UK. She is the author of Government Translation in South Korea: A Corpus Based Study (2022) and has widely published on corpus-based translation studies, audiovisual translation, and translation in pre-modern Korea, in international journals, such as Translation Studies, Translation and Interpret- ing Studies, the Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies, and Acta Koreana. She is on the editorial board of the Journal of Specialised Translation. Hye Jean CHUNG is Professor in Cultural Studies at Kyung Hee University. Her research interests include digital film production, global media, and Korean cinema. Her book, Media Heterotopias: Digital Effects and Material Labor in Global Film Production (2018), discusses the material conditions of digital pipelines and global film production. Jonathan EVANS is Reader in Translation Studies at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK. He is the author of The Many Voices of Lydia Davis (2016), co-author of Fan Translations (forthcoming), and co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Translation and Politics (2018). Ji-Hae KANG is Professor of Translation Studies and Director at Ajou Center for Translation and Interpreting Studies (ACTIS) at Ajou University, Republic of Korea. Her research focuses on institutional translation, the interplay between translation and digital culture, and issues of power and discourse in transna- tional exchanges. She is the guest editor of ‘Translation in Institutions’, a spe- cial issue of Perspectives: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice (2014), and the co-editor (with Judy Wakabayashi) of Translation and Interpreting in Korean Contexts: Engaging with Asian and Western Others (2019, Routledge). Her articles have been published widely in such journals as Target, The Transla- tor, Meta, and Perspectives, among others. She is currently Vice President of the Korean Association of Translation Studies (KATS) and serves on the editorial board of Perspectives and Translation and Interpreting (TIS). viii  Contributors Kyung Hye KIM is Assistant Professor at Dongguk University, South Korea. She conducts interdisciplinary research on the various ways in which translation impacts and shapes cross-cultural communication and challenges dominant dis- courses in society, particularly in the areas of corpus-based translation studies and in audiovisual translation. She is Chair of the Conference Committee of IATIS, the International Association for Translation and Intercultural Studies, and the International Cooperation Committee of the Korean Association for Translation Studies. Soo-Yeon SEO is South Korea’s first audio description writer (since 2003), who also works as a narrator and producer. In 2024, she earned a Ph.D. in accessibil- ity and audio description from the Department of English Translation at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. Her research focuses on audio description and the accessibility of a wide range of media, including television, theatre, exhibi- tions, and live performances. Zoë SHACKLOCK is Librarian and Researcher at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Her research focuses on mobility and contemporary television, with particular interests in embodied movement, queerness, and streaming interfaces and experiences. Her monograph Television and the Moving Body was pub- lished in 2024 with Edinburgh University Press. The editors would like to thank the research office in the College of Arts and Humanities, University of Glasgow, for their help in the planning stages of this pro- ject and throughout the lifetime of the grant that supported this research. Thanks to the open access team at the University of Glasgow library for help. We appreciated Routledge’s work on the book, especially the support of Jieun Kiaer as series edi- tor and Maia Berliner’s and Andrea Hartill’s shepherding of the project as editors. Thanks to all the project members for making the project happen through their incredible work: Hye Jean Chung, Matt Hills, Ji-Hae Kang, Jieun Kiaer, Mahnoo Kwon, Soo-Yeon Seo, Zoë Shacklock, and Chi-Yun Shin. This work was supported by the Fund for International Collaboration and the Economic and Social Research Council [grant number ES/W01081X/1]. Acknowledgements http://taylorandfrancis.com DOI: 10.4324/9781003596196-1 This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY 4.0 license. Introduction Jonathan Evans, Jinsil Choi, and Kyung Hye Kim Film director Bong Joon-ho caused a stir with his acceptance speech for the Golden Globe for best foreign language film in 2020. The most quoted line from his speech was “Once you overcome the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles, you will be intro- duced to so many more amazing films” (quoted in Yalcinkaya 2020). The film that won, Gisaengchung/Parasite (Dir. Bong Joon-ho, 2019), had already won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and went on to win the Academy Award Best Picture (the first foreign language film to do so). Shortly afterwards, the South Korean TV show Ojing-eo geim/Squid Game (Dir. Hwang Dong-hyuk, 2021) became the most watched show internationally on Netflix in 90 countries (Tan 2021). The massive international success of these two Korean media products brought new attention to South Korean film and TV, though for many viewers, they just confirmed a trend that had been going on since the mid-2000s of high-quality visual narratives coming from South Korea. The international success of these films and TV shows has gone hand-in-hand with the ongoing international popularity of other Korean media, such as K-pop, in what has become known as hallyu or the Korean wave. This has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention (Chua and Iwabuchi 2008; Y. Kim 2013, 2022; Lee and Nornes 2015; Jin 2016, 2024; Roy and Das 2022; Shin and Whitaker 2023; Samosir and Wee 2024; on New Korean Cinema, see also Shin and Stringer 2005; Paquet 2009; Choi 2010). This volume takes a slightly different tack. Instead of seeing the Korean wave as solely a success story of South Korean media pluckily taking on the world, it sees it as part of a larger phenomenon of international media flow, specifically focusing on the reciprocal relationships between Korean media and British media. One of the reasons to focus on British media is that Britain has a long history of public broadcasting in the form of the BBC and, since the 1980s, Channel 4, both of which have nurtured homegrown talent and produced an enormous range of TV shows and films, from cult classics like Doctor Who to popular versions of novels by Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, which themselves form part of a heritage film and media tradition. Equally, British media has often been sidelined by American media, which remains more hegemonic in many forms due to the power and popu- larity of Hollywood and the various networks. Certainly, British media has had less impact in Korea than American media, with low percentages of ticket sales https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003596196-1 2  Translating and Receiving Korean Media (Korean Film Council 2023; see also Evans and Choi 2023, 11) and relatively little academic research on the topic.1 British media is, then, in a hegemonic language (English) but not necessary in a hegemonic tradition,2 and this means that how it travels and how it is translated and adapted for local cultures, as well as their reactions to it, is of interest in understanding the cultural flows of media beyond a model of Hollywood and the rest of the world. British film and media, then, illus- trate Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour’s argument that “Every film is a foreign film” (Egoyan and Balfour 2004, 21), as all films are foreign to someone somewhere; but British film and media is also surprisingly foreign to other Anglophone viewers and viewers in other cultures who are more experienced at dealing with American media and film, as is the case in South Korea. The shape of the project behind the book was also defined, in part, by being funded by the Fund for International Collaboration and the Economic and Social Research Council (UK). The original project brought together scholars in film and media, Korean, and translation studies to discuss and analyse the reception of Korean media in the UK and British media in Korea over several events in Busan, Glasgow, Daegu, Seoul, and London. The chapters in this book are the results of some of that research. Streaming, diversity, and sustainability One of the things that attracted us to working on streaming, especially in the form of over-the-top (OTT) services, such as Netflix or Watcha, is that they have the capacity to carry an enormous amount of content. This can lead to what Chris Anderson (2004) called the “long tail”, where smaller, less well-known films and media become visible because of the sheer amount of content available. While later studies have questioned the economics of the long tail (e.g. Coelho and Mendes 2019), it remains an interesting possibility for media watching and certainly seems to be experientially borne out by the reappearance of older shows and films on YouTube and other streaming platforms, both free and paid for, as well as the phe- nomenon of collectible Blu-ray discs of old movies – often from less-prestigious genres like horror or thrillers – that has appeared in the last 10–15 years. Disney+, as Disney’s homegrown platform, has made available a huge amount of Disney’s back catalogue, some of which was previously very popular (e.g. The Little Mer- maid, The Lion King), as well as a number of TV shows that had been forgotten or which only had cult status (e.g. the sitcom Dinosaurs). Importantly, some of this material has been produced in languages other than English in locations other than North America. Where, previously, foreign-language media was difficult to find in Britain and the USA, being constrained to arthouse cinemas, late-night films, or series on public service channels, such as the BBC or Channel 4 (in the UK) or specific cable packages (in the USA), streaming has made it much easier to access media from around the globe. To an extent, it was our initial observation of this phenomenon, especially in relation to Korean media in the UK and British media in Korea, that sparked our interest in this topic and led to the network project that underpins the research in the chapters in this book. Introduction  3 Yet Netflix’s catalogue is not the same around the world, and Ramon Lobato (2019) has explored the relationship between streaming and nations. Far from offering a homogenous service across the countries it services, Netflix is affected by international licensing agreements, which affect which media content can be shown in which locales, as well as the availability of subtitles and dubbing in local languages. While there is a greater availability of material from around the world, it is not the same material. This greater range of material takes part in a widening diversity of stories that are told and bodies that are seen on screen. For example, Disney shows like The Owl House (2020–2023) and Primos (2024) have featured Hispanic protagonists, while Amphibia (2019–2022) and The Ghost and Mollie McGee (2021–2024) feature protagonists with Thai heritage. Netflix has been tracking its own diver- sity statistics and highlights how leading roles are now gender-balanced and nearly 47% of leads are from an ethnic minority (or were in the 2020–2021 season).3 As such, streaming services are offering a lot more diverse and inclu- sive homegrown programming. Imported materials, in the form of translated media, also contribute to this through showing different cultures and ethnicities. For example, the increase of Chinese-language materials from Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan show local narratives and actors on a global scale. This is especially true on Netflix, which (in its UK version) has materials from around the world, with particular concentrations of Indian films and Korean dramas. Streaming, therefore, offers a more diverse and inclusive range of narratives than broadcast TV, both in the materials produced by platforms and also in their international acquisitions. This does not mean, however, that there is no room for improvement, as current statistics from Netflix focus solely on ethnicity and gender, and there are other forms of minoritisation that can and should be rep- resented more. Streaming platforms also differ from previous forms of media distribution in their sustainability, which we understand here as encompassing both environmental and social impact. The diversity we discussed in the previous paragraph is part of that social sustainability and the creation of new jobs in the media, though it should also be noted that it is not straightforwardly positive or sustainable, given the ways in which media production itself has an environmental impact. As Richard Max- well and Toby Miller (2012) argue, all media have an effect on the environment, which is often through less obviously visible means: as consumers of streamed media, we do not think of all the wires needed to make that content appear in our house or on our phones, nor do we see the mines where rare earth metals used in those phones come from. The carbon produced by watching streamed television is also relatively high, once all parts of the chain of production and consumption are included (Sweney 2021). There is an increasing awareness of this within the media industry, and initiatives like We Are Albert, which certifies the sustainabil- ity of productions through estimating their carbon output. However, sustainability is rather complex, and there are ongoing issues around increased production and consumption, which are not easily resolved. That said, it is an important topic to examine as part of the overall understanding of media. 4  Translating and Receiving Korean Media Streaming and translation Streaming usage has accelerated since the COVID-19 pandemic, and the strong presence of international media on services such as Netflix highlights the impor- tance of translation for the success of selling media content to new audiences. The growing use of OTT platforms and video-on-demand (VOD) services has led to more media content, such as TV programmes and documentaries, as well as films being available to wider audiences. Indeed, OTT and streaming platforms, which not only offer a wide range of media contents produced in different languages and countries but also are gaining momentum, seem to be the most popular and efficient way to introduce international media content to audience groups in the other country. In addition to the existing platforms like Netflix, a number of local OTT platforms have grown. Examples of local OTT platforms include TVING, Coupang Play, Watcha (Korea), Hulu, d-anime Store (Japan), iQIYI, and Tencent Video (China). These homegrown OTTs seem to take a leap forward: at least in the Korean market, TVING surpassed Netflix in total daily hours watched, narrowing the gap with global streaming giant Netflix (Kim and Yeom 2024) and challenging the Netflix-centric video culture, which may be partly due to the increasingly dispersed contemporary Korean video culture that Jennifer M Kang acknowledges (Kang 2024).It is, therefore, not surprising to see a growing body of work on the effect of Netflix and streaming more generally on the media (e.g. Barker and Wiatrowski 2017; Lobato 2019; Pilipets 2019; Lotz 2022). However, these studies have rarely explored the role and the complexities of trans- lation, despite the pivotal role of translation in promoting media content on stream- ing platforms. Within translation studies, there has been some work on translation for Netflix (Pedersen 2018) and other services like Rakuten Viki (Dwyer 2012), and the special issue of the journal Target, co-edited by Choi, Kim, and Evans (2023), focuses on the ways in which translation for streamed media differs from translation in other media. It is certainly encouraging that the research remit has recently extended to cover a variety of topics and language pairs. For example, like the work of Valdez et al. (2023), Dallı (2024) discusses English as a pivot subtitling language on Netflix. Similar scholarly inquiry can be found in other non-English language literature, including Sung, Han, and Lim (2022), Ann (2023), and Kim (2024). One of the findings of Ann’s study (2023) that examines the Netflix Korean original series Kingdom and its Arabic subtitles (via English as a pivot) suggests that the English pivot translation resulted in the Arabic translation’s noticeable deviation from the Korean source text. Kuscu-Ozbudak (2022) and Bucaria (2023) contribute to the current scholarship by focusing on the audience’s reception of subtitling on Netflix, while Hayes (2021) and Hayes and García-Escribano (2022) focus on dubbing on Netflix. The concept of paratexts, which has mostly been applied to the study of (written) literature and sometimes to the media, has also been adopted in Kiran (2023) to discuss translation and localisation of media para- texts on Netflix. The dynamic and multidirectional nature of streaming services that go beyond the traditional unidirectional flow (e.g. translations of Hollywood Introduction  5 films produced in dominant languages like English to dominated languages like Korean) has allowed studies of a variety of language pairs, e.g. English-Turkish (Kiran 2023; Dallı 2024), Korean-Arabic (Ann 2023), and Korean-Japanese (Cho and Cho 2023). Beyond the study of subtitling strategies and English as a pivot language, researching Netflix remakes has also been conducted (e.g. Cho and Cho 2023), where the source and the target media texts are investigated to identify the extent to which linguistic and non-linguistic interventions are made to ensure the remake is acceptable to the target audience. Korean Media in Britain, British Media in Korea In the UK and Korea, the other country’s media have been seen as niche products, and research on the other country’s media have typically come from media studies. In 2012, scholars of Korean film based at UK universities had a one-day workshop in London, entitled “Korean Film: Years of Radical Change” and discussed differ- ent aspects of South Korean film (Jackson 2016). The year 2012 saw an upsurge of interest in Psy’s Gangnam Style, and the profile of South Korean popular culture was highly raised under the name of Hallyu (or the Korean Wave). Ever since then, film studies scholars in the UK continued the Korean Screen Culture Conference, and there is a growing recognition of Korean cinema in recent years. Due to the huge success of Korean cinema worldwide and particularly from the 71st BAFTA awards in 2018, Korean films received much attention in the UK, such as Agassi/ The Handmaiden (Dir. Park Chan-wook, 2016) and Parasite. The annual London Korean Film Festival is a good example that aims to introduce Korean films to Brit- ish audience. Despite a growing number of studies in Korean film and drama series written in English, the reception of Korean media in the UK is still largely underex- plored. Oh (2008) explored ways to promote Korean films as a cultural brand in the UK but did not discuss the reception of a particular Korean film in the UK. From translation studies, little has been identified as to how British audiences receive Korean films through translation, but the few exceptions include the editors’ work in 2022. We investigated the British audience reception of code-switching in the Handmaiden DVD translation. We found that while the film was received excitedly in the UK, some general audiences misunderstood the film as a Japanese produc- tion, which may be attributed to the colour change errors in the DVD English translation (Choi, Kim, and Evans 2022). Similarly, in Korea, work mainly from media and film studies has explored fea- tures of British films, produced by renowned British filmmakers, such as Alfred Hitchcock, Richard Lester, and Hugh Hudson (S. Kim 2013, 2016, 2019). Studies on New Wave films in Korea and the UK have also been carried out with a compar- ative view (Chung 2018), while the British film history has been discussed (Park 2003; Yoo 2022). However, studies on British films such as these are relatively rare, and the reception of British films in Korea has been little explored. The few exceptions include Kim and Son (2022)’s study, which, for educational purposes, 6  Translating and Receiving Korean Media used British films, such as Love Actually (Dir. Richard Curtis, 2003), Notting Hill (Dir. Roger Michell, 1999), and About Time (Dir. Richard Curtis, 2013) to teach British accents to Korean undergraduate students, but this study did not analyse the audience reception of the filmic content. This volume Such research gaps highlight the need for this edited volume, which is split into two parts: the first four chapters (Part 1) focus on the reception and translation of Korean media in the West, focusing specifically on the UK, while the last three (Part 2) focus on the translation and reception of British media in South Korea. In Chapter 1, Zoë Shacklock investigates how British audiences access and encoun- ter Korean television dramas on streaming services, such as Netflix and Viki. She analyses features of streaming platforms, such as categories and algorithms, and argues that audiences’ taste reflected on their consumption habits is combined with the distributers’ transnational formation of platforms. She highlights that the interface determines what programmes are visible to which audiences and discur- sively shapes how certain audiences perceive transnational television. Netflix UK organises categories considering national borders and boundaries, setting Korean programmes as foreign and separate from the unmarked Western, while Viki cat- egorises Korean television by internationally familiar genres. Next, Ji-Hae Kang explores media discourse about Squid Game in South Korea and the UK, which achieved a huge success worldwide. Investigating discourses in popular news media in both countries, such as the Guardian, the Times, The Econo- mist, Chosun Ilbo, and Kyunghyang Shinmun, she reveals similar and different dis- cursive constructions. While both British and Korean media frequently highlight its global popularity, British media tend to accentuate more on Netflix’s success of its internationalisation strategies and the popularity of non-English shows in the British audiovisual market and its possible negative consequences. In addi- tion, Korean media tend to highlight inequality in the Korean society, while British media tend to underline extreme anxieties portrayed in Squid Game. One area of media translation that is increasingly visible and is the triumph of various rights movements may be audio description (AD). There have been active discussions of media accessibility within and beyond translation studies (e.g. Matamala and Orero 2016; Talaván, Lertola, and Moreno 2021), but relatively lit- tle attention has been paid to AD in Korea, where only a handful of studies can be identified at the time of writing (e.g. Jeong and Kim 2022). Soo-Yeon Seo’s Coher- ence of the Korean and English audio description of Squid Game fills such a void. Seo examines the English audio description of Squid Game, particularly focusing on the four non-verbal elements – ddakji, figure in the mask, robotic doll, and dal- gona – with the aim of identifying how these key players in the narrative are trans- lated in AD and how multimodal elements like sound and visuals are considered to achieve the overall coherence of the AD texts. OTT platforms expand their global reach and AD services to broaden the audiences, but this means the detailed visual Introduction  7 representations of culturally specific items not only need to be added to AD when they first appear on the scene but should also be maintained throughout to achieve coherence and to allow visually impaired international AD users to appreciate dif- ferent cultures and foreign-language films. Whilst most of these studies present a case-study, Jonathan Evans discusses media translation and digital distribution technologies at a macro level. In Transla- tion, streaming and the Korean Film Archive: toward sustainable solutions, Evans draws our attention to one of the most pressing issues and that relates to the main theme of this volume: sustainability. Various practices pervasive in the translation industry from having a short-term contract and short-term labour to environmen- tally damaging activities are all touched upon. Slow but more sustainable models of media production and consumption and schemes that recognise environmen- tal sustainability that are potentially open to engagement with audiovisual media translation are also discussed in depth. In the first chapter of Part 2, Jinsil Choi explores a Korean streaming platform’s (Watcha) paratextual formation of BBC drama series Killing Eve (2018–2022) and its reception in South Korea. She highlights how distributers in cross-cultural boundaries reformulate and reconfigure promotional narratives to suit target audi- ences’ taste. She argues that Watcha’s promotion strategies to hide the original’s queer motives in its trailers for Season One change as the series receive an excited response in South Korea. She discusses Korean audiences’ more favorable atti- tude toward two women’s love based on the analysis of audience reviews on Watcha and argues that it suggests changing social attitudes toward queer culture in Korea. Kyung Hye Kim investigates Korean audiences’ participatory roles and the flu- idity of authorship focusing on the case of the British film I, Daniel Blake (Dir. Ken Loach, 2016). She analyses paratextual elements of the Korean translation available on a Korean streaming platform, such as trailers, posters, promotional videos, and user-generated videos on YouTube, and highlights the temporality of authorship in this digital era. In the analysis of user-generated videos, she dis- cusses how users reconstruct meanings and a central discourse of the source text, while they suppress the director and screenwriters’ intention in the original through non-translation. She further underlines the role of epitexts in the digital era, which can significantly change the main narrative of the original. While these studies focus more on the reception of the translated media, Hye Jean Chung’s Local nodes in global media networks: the Korean remake of BBC’s Life on Mars draws our attention to the global media network through the case of international remakes to position the Korean remake within the local media con- text and on global networks. Other media texts that feature the narrative device of time travel and nostalgic reimagining of the past are also discussed in terms of the sociocultural significance of the year each remake is set in. She argues that each international remake travels to the period that is significant in the nation’s history, e.g. the year that witnessed visibility of the nation in the global arena, modernisa- tion, and growth. 8  Translating and Receiving Korean Media Concluding remarks It is hoped that this book enhances our understanding of the dynamic media exchange by examining patterns and popularity of British media texts (films or TV shows) available on streaming services in Korea, and Korean media available on British streaming services, focusing on the role of translation in making accessible British media in Korea and vice versa. It can also help understand how transla- tions of media productions for international audiences can develop sustainable (in both an economic and environmental sense) media industries in the UK and Korea. Demonstrating the changing nature of television and film due to the impact of streaming services, this volume can also serve to transnationalise the understand- ing of British and Korean media beyond their cultures of origin to understand their dissemination and reception in other locations, considering how translation and distribution thus affect the afterlives of media texts. Moreover, it will also develop our understanding of the increasingly transnational audience for media and how this can affect and alter production practices. Notes 1 It is notable that when we searched this topic on Google from the UK in October 2024, the outcomes of the project that this book is part of were among the highest ranked. Work in Korean includes Kim 2019. 2 There are also media produced in Welsh and Gaelic, but they are outwith the scope of this study, and it is not entirely clear if they are distributed internationally. A search on Netflix UK for ‘Welsh language’ only comes up with two shows, and only one appears to be set in Wales. Results for ‘Gaelic’ also only show one show set in Scotland (which is in English). 3 https://about.netflix.com/en/news/making-progress-our-latest-film-and-series-diversity- study-and-netflix-fund (last accessed December 21, 2024). References Anderson, Chris. 2004. “The Long Tail.” Wired, October 1. https://www.wired.com/2004/10/ tail/. Ann, Hee-Yeun. 2023. “넷플릭스한국드라마<킹덤>의아랍어자막번역특성 [Character- istics of Arabic Subtitling of Netflix’s Korean Drama ].”한국이슬람학회논총 [Annals of Korean Association of the Islamic Studies] 33(2): 157–78. Barker, Cory, and Myc Wiatrowski, eds. 2017. The Age of Netflix: Critical Essays on Stream- ing Media, Digital Delivery and Instant Access. Jefferson: McFarland & Company. Bucaria, Chiara. 2023. “The Audience Strikes Back: Agency and Accountability in Audio- visual Translation and Distribution.” Target 35(3): 331–53. 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Gukjeokbyeol jeomyuyul [Shares by nationality]. Korea Box-office Information System. https://www.kobis.or.kr/kobis/business/stat/them/ findNationalityShareList.do. Kuscu-Ozbudak, Seda. 2022. “The Role of Subtitling on Netflix: An Audience Study.” Perspectives 30(3): 537–51. Lee, Sangjoon, and Abé Mark Nornes, eds. 2015. Hallyu 2.0: The Korean Wave in the Age of Social Media. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Lobato, Ramon. 2019. Netflix Nations: The Geography of Digital Distribution. New York: NYU Press. Lotz, Amanda D. 2022. Netflix and Steaming Video: The Business of Subscriber-Funded Video on Demand. Cambridge: Polity. Matamala, Anna, and Pilar Orero, eds. 2016. Researching Audio Description: New Approaches. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Maxwell, Richard, and Toby Miller. 2012. Greening the Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Oh, Jang Geun. 2008. “The Implication and Strategies of Korean Films’ Cultural Brand: The Case of Korean Film Branding in the UK.” Semiotic Inquiry 23: 353–78. Paquet, Darcy. 2009. New Korean Cinema: Breaking the Waves. London: Wallflower. Park, Woo Ryong. 2003. “Thatcherism and the Renaissance of British Film: Heritage Film.” Daegu Sahak 72: 439–70. Pedersen, Jan. 2018. “From Old Tricks to Netflix: How Local are Interlingual Subtitling Norms for Streamed Television?” Journal of Audiovisual Translation 1(1): 81–100. Pilipets, Elena. 2019. “From Netflix Streaming to Netflix and Chill: The (Dis)connected Body of Serial Binge-Viewer.” Social Media + Society 5(4): 1–13. Roy, Ratan Kumar, and Biswajit Das, eds. 2022. Korean Wave in South Asia: Transcultural Flow, Fandom and Identity. Singapore: Springer Nature. Samosir, Nora, and Lionel Wee. 2024. Sociolinguistics of the Korean Wave: Hallyu and Soft Power. New York: Routledge. Shin, Chi-Yun, and Julian Stringer, eds. 2005. New Korean Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Shin, Geon-Cheol, and Mark D. Whitaker. 2023. The Korean Wave in a Post-Pandemic World: BTS, Cosmax and Squid Game. Singapore: Springer. Sung, Seung-eun, Yu-jin Han, and Hyun-kyung Lim. 2022. “넷플릭스의중역을통한다국 어번역현황 [Netflix’s Multilingual Subtitling Through English Pivot Translation: Guide- lines, Current Practices and Future Directions].” 번역학연구 [The Journal of Translation Studies] 23(1): 45–80. Sweney, Mark. 2021. “Streaming’s Dirty Secret: How Viewing Netflix Top 10 Creates Vast Quan- tities of CO2.” Guardian, October 29. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/ oct/29/streamings-dirty-secret-how-viewing-netflix-top-10-creates-vast-quantity-of-co2. Talaván, Noa, Jennifer Lertola, and Ana Ibáñez Moreno. 2021. “Audio Description and Sub- titling for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing: Media Accessibility in Foreign Language Learn- ing.” Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts 8(1): 1–29. Tan, Monica. 2021. “Squid Game: The Smash-Hit South Korean Horror is a Perfect Fit for Our Dystopian Mood.” The Guardian, September 30. https://www.theguardian.com/ tv-and-radio/2021/oct/01/squid-game-the-smash-hit-south-korean-horror-is-a-perfect-fit- for-our-dystopian-mood. Valdez, Susana, Hanna Pięta, Ester Torres-Simón, and Rita Menezes. 2023. “Subtitlers’ Beliefs About Pivot Templates: What Do They Tell Us About Language Hierarchies and Translation Quality in Streaming Service Platforms?” Target 35(3): 426–54. https://www.kobis.or.kr/kobis/business/stat/them/findNationalityShareList.do https://www.kobis.or.kr/kobis/business/stat/them/findNationalityShareList.do https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/oct/29/streamings-dirty-secret-how-viewing-netflix-top-10-creates-vast-quantity-of-co2 https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/oct/29/streamings-dirty-secret-how-viewing-netflix-top-10-creates-vast-quantity-of-co2 https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/oct/01/squid-game-the-smash-hit-south-korean-horror-is-a-perfect-fit-for-our-dystopian-mood https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/oct/01/squid-game-the-smash-hit-south-korean-horror-is-a-perfect-fit-for-our-dystopian-mood https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/oct/01/squid-game-the-smash-hit-south-korean-horror-is-a-perfect-fit-for-our-dystopian-mood Introduction  11 Yalcinkaya, Günseli. 2020. “Parasite’s Bong Joon Ho: Get Over Subtitles, Watch Foreign Language Films.” Dazed, January 6. https://www.dazeddigital.com/film-tv/article/47346/1/ parasite-director-bong-joon-ho-golden-globes-subtitles-foreign-language-films. Yoo, Chang Yeon. 2022. “British Film of War and Postwar Reality, Cultural Tradition and Value Systems: A Study on British Film After World War 2 (1945–1956).” Reflection and Representation 3: 101–43. https://www.dazeddigital.com/film-tv/article/47346/1/parasite-director-bong-joon-ho-golden-globes-subtitles-foreign-language-films https://www.dazeddigital.com/film-tv/article/47346/1/parasite-director-bong-joon-ho-golden-globes-subtitles-foreign-language-films http://taylorandfrancis.com Part 1 Korean Media in the West http://taylorandfrancis.com DOI: 10.4324/9781003596196-3 This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY 4.0 license. 1 Taste at the interface Streaming K-dramas in the UK Zoë Shacklock In July  2021, Netflix debuted a promotional campaign titled ‘The World is on Netflix’. The campaign began with a video titled ‘Netflix streams the world’s stories across the universe’, in which a group of technicians travelled to Area 51 and ‘translated’ five Netflix series into an ‘alien language’, before seemingly broadcasting it to the Kepler-160 system. The video ends with the promise that ‘if extra-terrestrials are watching, Netflix can help them understand humanity’. The following day, a second video was released to fulfill this promise. It begins with a cartoon alien on a spaceship orbiting Earth, angrily swiping through news and security footage from Earth before discovering and selecting the Netflix logo. The alien, together with its fellow crewmembers, experiences a range of emotions while watching Netflix series, from sadness to humour, from fright to love. As the sun rises over the planet below the aliens, a title card pops up, stating that ‘the world’s stories are on Netflix’. This promotional campaign has much to tell us about how Netflix understands its own position and its own role within a global media ecosystem. Firstly, Netflix clearly positions itself as a global or transnational platform, a site where all the world’s voices and stories can be found and accessed. Secondly, Netflix sees itself as the entity that mediates the encounter between local and foreign contexts. Within the advertisement itself, this is represented by the alien community, who are able to understand the human race through their consumption of Netflix content. Yet the broader implication applies for any viewer who might be watching material that seems foreign or unfamiliar: Netflix will, the service promises, allow you to understand a world, a people, a culture that might seem alien to you. In doing so, Netflix positions itself as the interface between self and other, between familiar and strange, between local and foreign. And this is explicitly visualised through the interface that the aliens navigate, in which the Netflix logo stands out in bright colours from the grey, pale colours of the other footage on their screen. In this video, Netflix not only promises an encounter with the other but also suggests that the organisation of the interface might tell us something about how that encounter should unfold – in the case of the aliens, the full colour spectrum of the range of human emotions. I started this chapter with a description of this campaign because it summa- rises much of what I am interested in – the transnational encounters that audiences https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003596196-3 16  Translating and Receiving Korean Media have with international streaming television and how they might be facilitated or shaped by specific streaming interfaces. The chapter argues that the interface plays a crucial role in determining not just what programmes are visible to which audiences but discursively shapes how we should understand transnational televi- sion. I  explore these ideas through a case study of accessing K-dramas through the interfaces of Netflix UK and Rakuten Viki. The term ‘K-drama’ refers to tel- evision fiction created in South Korea and encompasses a wide range of genres, not exclusively dramatic texts. K-dramas are a prominent feature on both Netflix, the largest and most ubiquitous SVOD (streaming video on demand) service, and Rakuten Viki, an SVOD that focuses exclusively on East Asian content. Using Hyejung Ju’s (2021) definition of transcultural consumption as defined by patterns of both otherness and similarity, I look at how the organisation of the interface – in particular, the category and the algorithm – encourages encounters with both other- ness and with familiarity respectively. In doing so, I update Straubhaar’s (1991) work on ‘cultural proximity’ to argue that what I  term ‘consumption proximity’ determines viewer’s encounters with K-dramas on streaming television. The algo- rithmic organisation of streaming television means that Korean television’s ability to reach audiences is determined by the extent to which their consumption habits align with a transnational taste formation. Consequently, while Netflix’s intergalac- tic campaign still revolves around discourses of travel, I argue that at the interface itself, it is taste that is the dominant framework for understanding transnational television flow today. Travelling television and television interfaces Discussions of global television distribution have always been structured by the interplay between similarity and difference. For some scholars, it is the otherness of global television that holds the most power, and its meaning derives from the fact that it comes from somewhere else and travels to arrive somewhere new. Mimi White notes that many of the foundational theories of television, such as Raymond Williams’ work on flow (1974), present the experience of watching foreign tel- evision as ‘an ethnographic discovery’ (White 2003, 100). For Williams, it was the experience of watching American television in a hotel room in Miami, with its rapid, frequent commercial breaks that inspired him to understand television as continuous flow rather than discrete programmes with interruptions. Here, it is foreign television’s status as ‘other’ that facilitates Williams’ understanding of the medium itself, its very difference and unfamiliarity giving it the power to reveal some deeper truth. In a similar way, theories of cultural imperialism see media dis- tribution and consumption as a one-way flow of material outwards from the Anglo- phone world. The 1985 UNESCO report identifies two major flows of media and information around the world: from the centre to the periphery and from the North to the South (Mowlana 1985, 64). These theories focus on the power differential between dominant television industries and the rest of the world and, as Lisa Parks and Shanti Kumar state, often fall into the trap of ‘characterising non-Western societies as being “traditional” and previously unspoiled by contact with modern Taste at the interface  17 (Western) cultures’ (2003, 5). Cultural imperialism thus again stresses the differ- ence, or seeming ‘inauthenticity’, of dominant global television’s presence in a local culture. Other theorists focus instead on tracing the similarities between local and global television. Most famously and significantly, Joseph Straubhaar coined the term ‘cultural proximity’ to describe television audiences’ viewing preferences (1991). Developed as a criticism to theories of media imperialism, cultural proximity refers to the idea that audiences prefer to watch material that is most similar, or proxi- mate, to their own culture. Straubhaar argues that cultural proximity is ‘perceived in specific things like humour, gender images, dress, style, lifestyle, knowledge about other lifestyles, ethnic types, religion, and values that seem familiar or com- fortable’ (2021, 26). Consequently, on television, cultural proximity is visible most obviously in audiences’ preference for local or national programmes but can also be seen in the importance of regional television markets, such as the flow of media throughout Latin America, Europe, or East Asia. Cultural proximity is central not only to understandings of the format trade on television but also to understandings of transnational adaptations: if a programme’s success depends on cultural prox- imity, then international programmes or formats need to be adapted to that local context in order to be successful (Moran 1998). For these theorists, it is similarity to local or national contexts that is most important in understanding the flows of global television. Across all of this scholarship, the key question involved is the question of how television travels: for the cultural imperialists, it is the incursion of dominant Western television into less powerful media cultures; for Straubhaar, it is the easy movement of texts between similar nations; for Williams, it is the movement of audiences into and out of unfamiliar television contexts. C. Lee Harrington and Denise Bielby, in their work on the flow of global television content through inter- national trade fairs, argue that any theory of travelling television needs to pay closer attention to these channels of circulation (2005). They explore how buyers at trade fairs negotiate a web of contextual elements, such as national, star, and/or authorial reputation, existing fan audiences, and economic and critical success, arguing that some of these ‘travel well on the circuit of culture’, and that some do not (2005, 905). Thus, the movement of global television involves a range of different kinds of travelling and a range of overlapping patterns of both similarity and difference. For Harrington and Bielby, understanding global television requires understand- ing the details of the distributional pathways that programmes have taken to reach audiences, rather than trying to develop a universal theory to describe all television distribution. The two key issues circulating throughout this discussion – distribution circuits and audience experience, and the relationship between similarity and difference – have also been central to understandings of Western engagement with Korean film and television. Chi-Yun Shin outlines the significance of distribution circuits in determining the cultural meaning of East Asian films in the West (2008). She argues that the prominence of Tartan Films’ ‘Asia Extreme’ label – the most high-profile label for distributing East Asian films in Western markets  – linked East Asian 18  Translating and Receiving Korean Media cinema with violent, shocking content, cementing ‘Western audiences’ perception of the East as weird and wonderful, sublime and grotesque’. For Shin, distribu- tion pathways work to discursively mark out East Asian cinema as ‘other’. More recently, Hyejung Ju focuses on Western audience’s engagement with Korean tel- evision on Netflix (2021). She argues that Western audiences engage with Korean programmes transculturally, something which involves ‘both exotic and somehow familiar perspectives on K-drama texts, allowing foreign viewers to experience a reminiscent sense as well as a sense of fascination for “otherness” ’ (2021, 174). Ju traces these patterns of both similarity and difference not only within the content and aesthetics of the programmes themselves but also across audience reviews on IMDb. Hyunji Lee echoes Ju’s argument, suggesting that it is the ‘combination of familiarity and difference’ involved in the transnational consumption of K-dramas that increases the appeal of such media (2018, 367). Lee goes on to largely focus on the differences, arguing that K-dramas are ‘perceived and enjoyed as a “differ- ent” text’ by Western viewers (2018, 373). For all of these authors, the distribution and reception of K-dramas in the West is shaped by a play between similarity and difference, although different emphases may emerge depending on the particular context. Yet in the world of streaming television, the organisation of distribution systems and audiences and the very relationship between local and global television all look somewhat different. Ramon Lobato argues that ‘Netflix does not fit particularly well with the scalar vocabulary of national/transnational/global on which the field of media studies has traditionally relied’, instead combining elements from all scales in different ways (2019, 70). While the workings of media trade fairs are largely hidden from public view, streaming’s combination of different scales of location is made explicitly visible to audiences at the level of the interface itself. A stream- ing service’s interface refers to the graphical, interactive screen of menus that we encounter and navigate in order to select particular film or television programme to watch. Daniel Chamberlain argues that media interfaces are both ‘non-places’, in that they are not ‘in themselves destinations’ but sites of transit and transporta- tion, aimed at moving audiences from their homes into the world of entertainment (2011, 234). If Harrington and Bielby see the trade fair as the key transportational site in which local and global television meet, I would argue that the interface has taken on this role today. It is the interface that determines what programmes are visible to us and how and through which labels, menus, and categories we must navigate in order to find them. It is the interface that brings together local and global television and holds the potential to recombine these categories together in different ways. And it is the interface that positions us within this mediated geogra- phy, offering us a whirlwind tour across a world of television before we even enter the programmes themselves. I am particularly interested in streaming television’s interfaces because televi- sion itself has always been understood as itself an interface – a point of encoun- ter between here and there, between private and public, between self and other, between home and world. Misha Kavka refers to as the ‘cusp of the interface con- stituted by the . . . TV screen’ (2008, 28), and David Morley describes television as Taste at the interface  19 offering an ‘interfacing’ between public and private, local and global (2003, 273). Both of these authors explicitly describe television as an interface, a point at which two different things can meet, interact, and transform one another. This quality is also central to transnational encounters with television, which, as I have outlined, stand as its own interface between similarity and difference. While Kavka and Morley were both writing before the development of streaming television, today, television-as-interface has moved from being a figure of speech, or a more abstract quality of the medium, to being explicitly visualised in the graphical interfaces of streaming television services – interfaces that explicitly shape how those more abstract forms of encounter and access happen. It is important to note that the interface is never neutral. Chamberlain uses another spatial metaphor to describe the interface  – the ‘scripted space’ (2011, 233). Borrowing the term from Norman Klein’s work on the architectural determi- nation of theme park experiences (2004), Chamberlain argues that media interfaces are designed to prioritise interactivity and agency, a design that works specifically to obscure the careful ‘scripting’ that occurs underneath (2011, 240). For Chamber- lain, an analysis of media interfaces reveals not just the scripting of ideology and power structures but also the ‘broader techno-cultural formation[s]’ of the media ecologies within which they operate (2011, 249). Elsewhere I have made a simi- lar argument, suggesting that the organisation of streaming television interfaces works discursively to construct ideas of identity – in particular, how the categorical organisation of LGBTQ streaming television produces knowledge about what does and does not count as queerness (Shacklock 2023). In this chapter, I argue that the discursive power of the interface’s scripted spaces equally works to shape ideas of what counts as local or global television and how we as audiences should be responding to it. For if the interface presents itself as the threshold through which we can access television from elsewhere, it also carefully designs how that experi- ence is shaped, shaping the parameters of our encounters with global television. Constructing otherness in the category In the United Kingdom, Netflix is by far the most high-profile and popular stream- ing service offering Korean programmes, with 59% of UK households subscrib- ing to the platform in 2023 (Ofcom 2023, 16). Korean television is available on other platforms: Rakuten Viki has an extensive catalogue of East Asian television (including K-dramas) yet relies on volunteer fan labour to provide subtitles. Apple TV and Disney+ both offer selected Korean or Korean-American ‘originals’  – at the time of writing, only one each, Pachinko (Apple TV, 2022–present) and Snowdrop (JTBC/Disney+, 2021–2022), respectively. Netflix, therefore, combines the breadth and diversity of a platform, such as Rakuten Viki, with the industrial weight and authority of the more established streaming services and remains the most dominant site through which to watch K-dramas in the UK. The service began acquiring distribution rights for K-dramas in 2016, and the first Korean Netflix original, Kingdom (2019–2020), aired in 2019. Also in 2019, Netflix signed a three-year partnership with CJ ENM and its subsidiary, Studio Dragon, to produce 20  Translating and Receiving Korean Media original series. Netflix CCO Ted Sarandos described the deal as ‘allow[ing] us to bring more top-tier Korean drama to Netflix members in Korea and all over the world’, clearly working to establish Netflix’s reputation as the leading international home for K-dramas (Siklos and Ko 2019). In a press statement from January 2023, Netflix stated that more than 60% of all Netflix members had watched Korean titles in the past year, and Don Kang, Netflix VP of Content in Korea, claimed that the service ‘will continue to be the ultimate destination’ for Korean media (Cho and Lee 2023). Yet while Netflix may present itself as the international ‘destination’ for Korean media, it is worth remembering that for every Netflix user, the interface through which they access this media looks slightly different. As opposed to linear, broad- cast television, in which programmes are delivered to us according to the schedule and are encountered as time-based, streaming television is presented to us first and foremost via the category. Categories are determined by metadata or the various labels that a programme or film is labelled with. Metadata categories include genre categories, such as comedy, drama, fantasy, and many more; format categories, such as whether a property is a film or a television series, or whether it is docu- mentary or animation; constructions of quality, such as ‘award-winning’; and, of course, national signifiers that point to a country of origin. The organisation of the categories on the homepage – which ones are present, the order that they appear in, and the selection of thumbnails we see within them – are determined by the workings of the Netflix algorithm. I will return to consider the algorithm in more detail later in this chapter; for now, I want to explore how Netflix categories Korean television and what kind of transnational thresholds these categories construct for us to step across. To do so, I will use my own Netflix interface as an example. I am a casual but not committed viewer of K-dramas, and my interface provides a useful example of a non-fan encounter with Korean television. In using my own interface as a case study, I am inspired by Amy Holdsworth’s suggestion that the autobiographical tells us ‘not only something specific about television but also something more general about living with television’ (2021, 5; original emphasis). While Holdsworth is interested in the long durational aspects of both ordinary life and television, I want to consider what the personalised interface tells us not just about television’s scripted spaces but also how it constructs and shapes our own experience of the local-global threshold. Most obviously, Netflix groups K-dramas together under the ‘K-drama’ category. Here, we see an equal construction of genre (drama), but also nation, in terms of the ‘K’, or Korean. The construction of a nationality category is not rare on the Netflix interface; on mine, I  also frequently see British and US categories, again often combined with genre or quality signifiers, such as ‘drama’ or ‘award-winning’. The prevalence of such nationally-oriented categories tells us immediately that when it comes to contemporary television, nation still matters: national origin is just as important as quality or genre as a framework for understanding television. This may feel like an obvious point, but it is worth remembering that Netflix could eas- ily prioritise other metadata elements over nation. The consistent and repeated use of the national category serves to re-inscribe the borders of the nation at the level Taste at the interface  21 of the streaming interface, parcelling out and neatly isolating K-dramas from other programmes on the service. As well as nation, we also see other geographical signifiers inscribed within the categories – in particular, a transnational understanding of continents or world regions. My Netflix interface also presents me with categories for East Asian TV and the more general Asian TV. These categories still include Korean television but also programmes from Japan (Run for the Money [Netflix, 2022], Midnight Diner [Netflix, 2016–2019]) and China (The Untamed [Tencent Video, 2019]). Much of the scholarship on transnational television recognises the importance of consid- ering supra-national regions alongside nation. Jean Chalaby explores the rise of pan-European channels, outlining how these channels both present global news and content to European audiences while engaging in some practices of localisa- tion within nations (2002). For Chalaby, these channels act as a ‘bridge that helps the global reach the local’ (2002, 200). John Sinclair analyses the power of the Latin American television market, arguing that it contributes to the construction of ‘geolinguistic regions’, ones which challenge the North/South binary (1996, 36). The construction of supra-national regions thus not only acts as another site of tele- vision distribution and circulation but also another way of understanding one’s own position within a globalised media environment: for Europe’s balance of global news and localised content, transnational television promotes community through difference; for Latin America’s ‘contra-flows’ of Spanish and Portuguese-language programmes, television establishes a community and an industry that exists in par- allel to US and English language cultures. On Netflix, the presentation of the regional category also works discursively to construct a particular geographical dynamic for UK viewers to inhabit. As well as determining the construction of categories, metadata also determines how we search for programmes and what we find; you can only find something with a keyword search if you search for keywords that have been tagged as metadata. If a programme has not been tagged as historical, for example, it will not appear in any searches I perform for historical dramas. Consequently, the recurrence of Korean programmes throughout the Asian categories tells us that in order to find it, we simply need to search for ‘Asian television’. For those of us in the UK, ‘Korean’ is to some extent interchangeable with ‘East Asian’ or ‘Asian’ television. To put this into further context, it is worth noting that I have never seen an ‘Americas’ category on my interface, and British television never appears in any regional cate- gory, whether European or English-language. Consequently, while Korea and East Asia are interchangeable, the US and the UK are never substituted for anything but themselves. The category labels that Netflix uses and presents thus work to both script and reveal the broader geopolitical dynamics of the media ecology in which streaming operates, hinting at the fact that even within the global promise of Netf- lix, patterns of dominance still persist. To return to Ju’s suggestion that the Western ‘transcultural’ engagement with K-dramas involves both familiarity and difference, we can see how the category reiterates what she calls that ‘sense of fascination for “otherness” ’ (2021, 174). The Korean and Asian categories discursively construct Korean television as something 22  Translating and Receiving Korean Media that can and must be isolated from other content on the service, in a way that reiterates both the primacy of nation and the dominance of a West-East split. At the time of writing, my Netflix interface presents me with the ‘Sci-Fi & Fantasy Programmes’ category, which includes Warrior Nun (Netflix, 2020–2022), Avatar: The Last Airbender (Nickelodeon, 2005–2008), Lucifer (Fox/Netflix, 2016–2021), and Stranger Things (Netflix, 2016–present). It also presents ‘Casual Viewing’, including Superstore (NBC, 2015–2021), Kim’s Convenience (CBC, 2016–2021), Travel Man (Channel 4, 2015-present), and Motherland (BBC Two, 2016-present). ‘Quirky Viewing’ offers Derry Girls (Channel 4, 2018–2022), The Good Place (NBC, 2016–2020), The Umbrella Academy (Netflix, 2019–present), and Emily in Paris (Netflix, 2020–present). Few Asian programmes are included in any of these categories; instead, they remain predominantly separated out into the national or regional oriented categories. Consequently, on my interface, Korean and East Asian television is almost always separated out and marked as coming from ‘else- where’. In contrast, Western television is presented more often as an unmarked default, simply able to be casual or quirky without an additional national label attached. It is likely that more committed viewers of K-dramas will be met with a different categorical construction; my point is simply that at a more casual (or initial) engagement with Korean streaming television, the interface always parcels it out as something different, something exotic. Through the construction of the national and regional category, UK audiences are invited to encounter Korean tel- evision by stepping across a threshold into a world marked as ‘other’. Consumption proximity and the algorithm If the category helps to inscribe the experiences of difference and otherness that make up Ju’s theory of transcultural engagement, then it is the algorithm that con- structs feelings of similarity, recognition, and reminiscence. An algorithm is simply a set of rules or procedures that are followed to compute a task or solve a prob- lem. While algorithms structure all sorts of computer functions, they are most vis- ible today in their predictive functions, as a tool that determines how our various online platforms are organised and presented to us: everything from sorting emails to targeting advertisements to recommending items for purchase or consumption. Netflix, like other streaming services, uses what we call a collaborative filtering algorithm to organise individual users’ interfaces (Johnson 2019). Collaborative filtering works by mapping similarities between the different taste profiles of dif- ferent users. To use a K-drama example, if my friend and I both watched Extraordi- nary Attorney Woo and I went on to watch Crash Landing on You (tvN, 2019–2020) and my friend watched The Silent Sea (Netflix, 2021), it would recommend the two latter shows to both of us, based on the shared point in our history. Collabora- tive filtering algorithms rely on machine learning, in which the more information they receive about both individual users’ preferences and a broader user base, the ‘smarter’ or more ‘accurate’ they seemingly become. On Netflix, this information is gathered from not just user viewing preferences but also the specific thumbnails they choose to click on, information about time spent browsing, and how long or Taste at the interface  23 how much of a programme a user watches. Matthias Frey suggests that a collabora- tive filtering algorithm ‘quickly sizes you up and suggests content that, based on its data from other users, a person like you would enjoy’ (2021, 43). The algorithm, then, promises to recognise something about your media preferences based on its similarity to those of other users. Earlier in this chapter, I outlined the theory of cultural proximity, in which audi- ences prefer to watch material that is somehow ‘proximate’ to their own cultural backgrounds and contexts. I want to update this theory for the age of streaming, arguing that it is what I  term ‘consumption proximity’ that determines, shapes, and predicts viewers’ encounters with international television. If I want Korean programmes to be displayed prominently on my Netflix interface, I need to have made consumption choices that are similar, or proximate, to the particular selec- tion of choices that the algorithm identifies as being part of a Korean media taste formation. Consequently, if decisions about cultural proximity happen at the level of distribution deals (such as Harrington and Bielby’s trade fairs), in which buyers and executives decide whether a text will be successful in a new market, decisions about what is and is not ‘proximate’ on streaming are mediated by the workings of the algorithm. Rather than cultural proximity, it is consumption proximity that determines our likelihood of watching and encountering transnational streaming television. To identify how these patterns of consumption proximity might work, I created a new Netflix profile on my own account, effectively beginning with a ‘blank slate’. In order to begin watching, you must first select your preferred language and then select three thumbnails from a list of programmes, which will, Netflix promises, help the service ‘to find TV programmes and films you’ll love’. Immediately, Net- flix asks users to reflect upon, identify, and communicate their own consumption preferences, making it clear that such consumption patterns are central to the oper- ation of the platform. However, the initial list was overwhelmingly composed of US and UK programmes: the only Korean programme included was Squid Game (Netflix, 2021–present). Consequently, the default Netflix user in the UK is not only presumed to be interested in predominantly Western content but also unable to step outside of this positioning (although this may also be influenced by my choice of English as my preferred language). To proceed, I selected three programmes to best model an average UK viewer: Stranger Things, the second-most popular programme on Netflix (behind Squid Game), and two UK-set programmes, Sex Education (Netflix, 2019–present) and The Crown (Netflix, 2016–present). Unsurprisingly, Netflix did not initially rec- ommend me any K-dramas or any Korean media at all. The ‘Trending Now’ and ‘Popular on Netflix’ categories always reflect what is trending and popular amongst viewers with similar viewing histories to you, not the most watched programmes on the platform overall. These categories were filled with scripted US and UK programmes, such as Peaky Blinders (BBC One/Two, 2013–2022), Breaking Bad (AMC, 2008–2013), Wednesday (Netflix, 2022), and Friends (NBC, 1994–2004). Further down the interface, I was presented with a range of categories that encom- passed quality (‘BAFTA Award Winners & Nominees’), audiences (Family Watch 24  Translating and Receiving Korean Media Together TV), and modes of viewing (‘Watch in One Weekend’). With little infor- mation on my taste preferences, the interface reflected not my own habits but more externally defined categories, such as quality judgments or audience groupings, or Netflix’s own preferred mode of marathon consumption. At this point, the interface was not providing me with a reflection of myself but an invitation to engage in sanctioned consumption habits – ‘good’ taste, family viewing, and marathon view- ing. It is, of course, significant that this initial interface contained few invitations to watch non-US/UK television, only including Squid Game and the German Netflix original 1899 (Netflix, 2022) in the ‘Watch in One Weekend’ category. Again, the default user, and the default invitation to begin carving out a consumption pathway through the interface, remain overwhelmingly Western-focused. To watch Korean television, I needed to choose to follow a pathway that was not offered to me on the front page of my interface. I searched for the K-drama category and began to watch Business Proposal (SBS TV, 2022), watching the first two episodes. The next day, I  logged back into Netflix and was presented with a top banner for Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha (tvN, 2021), a romance-oriented K-drama. Yet further down my interface, the categories continued to be largely Western-oriented, the similar categories of quality and audiences (this time, teen dramas) as before. Following Netflix’s recommendation, I watched two episodes of Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha. On day three, my interface began to provide me with far more programmes from Korea: the very first category on my interface, following ‘Continue Watching’ and before ‘Trending Now’, was ‘K-Dramas’, and ‘Trend- ing Now’ now category was overwhelmingly oriented around K-dramas, including Crash Landing on You, Extraordinary Attorney Woo (ENA, 2022), Vincenzo (tvN, 2021), and Twenty-Five Twenty-One (tvN, 2022). After three days of browsing, clicking, and watching, I was able to recognise my own consumption history (and preferences) reflected back at me at level of the interface; it was similar to my activities of the preceding three days. The ‘reminis- cent sense’ that Ju identifies in transcultural television engagement is, on streaming, mediated by the workings of the algorithm. It is the interface that feels familiar to us that provides us with a feeling of recognition, a testament to the previous choices we have made. In Matthias Frey’s survey of Netflix user experiences, he found that users accepted that their Netflix recommendations had a ‘significant relationship to some aspect of their own identity’ (2021, 151). Users thus expect that the algorithm tells them something true about themselves, holding up a mirror in which they can see their own preferences and identities reflected back at them. Netflix encourages such recognition through categories such as ‘For You’, which again serve as an explicit reminder that the programmes we see on the interface have a meaningful relationship to our own selves. While part of what users might see in the algorith- mic mirror may align with cultural identity, it is important to remember that the algorithm does not make recommendations based on demographic data but entirely on a user’s consumption history and its similarity to that of other users. Again, the feelings of recognition, similarity, and proximity that we experience at the interface are based in consumption proximity – proximity to our own previous choices and how similar they may be to that of other users. Taste at the interface  25 In updating the idea of cultural proximity to consumption proximity, I  am updating another key term or metaphor that emerges in discussion of transnational television – the idea of travel. Harrington and Bielby note that transnational televi- sion is always discussed through ‘discourses of tourism, migration, global trade and diaspora’, meaning that both programmes and viewers are imagined as ‘trav- ellers, tourists, sojourners, exiles, vagabonds, pilgrims, or nomads’ (2005, 903). Indeed, in Lee’s analysis of Western audiences’ encounters with K-dramas, she notes that viewers described K-drama viewing as a form of ‘travelling’ itself (2018, 374). Yet Harrington and Bielby are cautious about this metaphor, suggesting that it flattens the complicated processes and circuits within transnational television, across industrial, distributional, and reception contexts (2005, 916). Rather than travel, I argue that encounters with transnational streaming televi- sion are largely mediated by discourses of taste. Ien Ang suggests that audience’s ability to encounter transnational television depends on whether they exist within or outside of what she calls a ‘zone of cultural affinity’ (2004, 305). Yet on stream- ing services, as I have argued, this zone is a zone of consumption affinity. To see K-dramas on a Netflix interface, one must have displayed consumption habits that are similar to other users who watch K-dramas. In the user profile that I designed for this chapter, it took three days of watching K-drama episodes and clicking on K-drama thumbnails – three days of performing a particular taste preference – for the algorithm to plot it against other users and begin to reflect it back to me. Again, rather than cultural proximity or cultural affinity, what mediates the likelihood of a Netflix UK user encountering K-dramas is their similarity to the K-drama taste profile that Netflix has built up through collaborative filtering. Our encounters are mediated primarily through our selective consumption, our ability to enact particular tastes on the interface, which in turn reflects a particular kind of taste back to us. Taste is a useful framework for approaching transnational streaming television because it is, of course, already a key framework and metaphor through which peo- ple talk about streaming. Matthias Frey considers whether Netflix has the power to shake up ideas of ‘good’ taste from a bounded concept that is shaped by a ‘small, homogenous cultural elite’ to a more fragmented world of many different personal tastes (2021, 193). Similarly, the repeated use of the ‘binge’ metaphor to charac- terise Netflix’s invitation to watch many episodes of a series at once again discur- sively presents the platform as a site of consumption and taste. Yet ideas of ‘taste’ have also been key for understanding transnational encounters with K-dramas. Jennifer Rachel Dutch has argued that food is a crucial site of affective meaning for Western fans of K-dramas (2019). Drawing from ideas of culinary tourism, she argues that Western fans ‘yearn’ for authentic Korean cuisine (2019, 8). She makes the interesting point that ‘while culinary tourism represents the exploration of “an other” ’, international K-drama fans desire less an encounter with new cui- sine than with more of the same of what they have already been consuming – as she says, “not a true taste of Korea, but the real flavour of K-Dramaland” (2019, 17). Here, Dutch alludes to those two patterns of feeling that make up Ju’s transcul- tural reading strategy – similarity and difference – suggesting that Western fans’ 26  Translating and Receiving Korean Media taste preferences are organised around proximity to media texts, not to a desire to broaden one’s actual palate. To apply these ideas surrounding taste to the discussion so far, we can see that on Netflix, the category offers an opportunity to explore and consume the other, a kind of culinary tourism laid out in a buffet. The algorithm, conversely, narrows down our taste into a recognition of particular taste formation, a particular cui- sine, one that is more a reflection of ourselves and our own tastes. Consequently, the patterns of similarity and difference that both Ju and Lee foreground in their work are mediated and experienced at the level of the streaming interface. Henry Jenkins, writing in 2006, argues that transnational fan audiences use international media consumption as an ‘escape route’ from the limitations of their own local communities and cultures (152). Here, Jenkins uses a metaphor of travel to present transnational fandom as an explicit rejection of and resistance to cultural proximity. Yet at the streaming interface, while the bounded category may allow some kind of escape into something ‘different’, the algorithmic organisation offers not move- ment elsewhere but a mirror reflection of one’s own consumption. Consequently, the framework of taste allows for a better recognition of this dialectic of similarity and difference and how it is foregrounded by different elements of the streaming interface. Otherness and similarity on Viki Thus far, I  have been focusing on Netflix, which, as I  outlined earlier, is the dominant service through which UK audiences access K-dramas. Yet my con- clusions about the interface are limited to Netflix: while streaming interfaces do share elements in common across services, each has a distinctive organisation that will undoubtedly shape the transnational encounters we have at their thresholds. I want to turn now to explore these transcultural patterns of similarity and differ- ence, and questions of taste, through a different streaming service – Rakuten Viki (hereafter referred to as Viki). Founded by Korean entrepreneurs in Singapore in the mid-2000s and purchased by the Japanese technology conglomerate Rakuten in 2013, Viki focuses exclusively on East Asian film and television; as its tag- line states, it is ‘the heart of Asian entertainment’. Much of the existing scholar- ship on Viki focuses on its reliance on fans and fan labour to provide subtitles (a practice known as fansubbing). Tessa Dwyer sees Viki fansubbers as challeng- ing dominant ideas surrounding the one-way flow of media, deliberately attempt- ing to ‘overcome the geopolitical realities’ that determine the traditional limits of transnational media distribution (2012, 236). Jamie Henthorn suggests that fan- subbers work collaboratively to imagine (and reimagine) what work and labour might look like in a global community (2019). Both of these authors see Viki as a threshold between local and global at which new ideas of the transnational are produced. Yet their focus on labour – on the specific activities, organisation, and experiences of fansubbers – means that neither considers how these ‘geopoliti- cal realities’ might be encountered by audiences at the front-facing level of the interface itself. Taste at the interface  27 Like Netflix, Viki organises and presents its programmes through various catego- ries. Categories are presented on the homepage of the interface in the same format as Netflix: users can scroll vertically through the list of categories and horizontally to see the items within each category. Yet unlike Netflix, Viki includes an explicit invitation to browse categories through the drop-down ‘Categories’ menu at the top of the page. This menu presents categories organised in three groups: nation (Korea, Mainland China, Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, and Others); genre (including romantic comedy, costume and period, romance, crime and mystery, and action); and a selec- tion of different types of content, such as ‘new’, ‘paid content’, ‘watch free’, and ‘fan collections’. It is immediately clear that Viki’s categorical organisation sets up a distinct geopolitical configuration, one that, for Western viewers, offers a differ- ent transnational encounter than Netflix. Unlike Netflix, the East-West split is not inscribed or reiterated at the level of the interface. There is no indication here of a difference between East Asian television as ‘other’, marked out from the rest of the service’s offerings. The organisation of the different national categories does reveal something about the power of different national television industries – Korea and Mainland China at the top of the list and the nondescript ‘Others’, which includes one programme from Vietnam and four from Hong Kong. Consequently, while this categorical organisation still inflects and mirrors the dominant media patterns within the region, in terms of which nations export more television and hold more power in the region, it does not rely upon a binary construction of self and other. Underneath the list of nations, there is a button to display ‘All Categories’. Interestingly, clicking through to this page brings up a list that removes any ref- erence to nation at all, instead revolving entirely around genre categories. These genres overwhelmingly reflect genre configurations that are familiar to Western audiences – crime, music, romance, medical, supernatural, etc. – with only a few specific to East Asian television, such as ‘BL’ (Boys’ Love, referring to male-male romances aimed at mostly female audiences). Lee argues that Western fans of K-dramas are ‘drawn to, at least in part, the familiarity of the genres and tropes which are influenced by Western media’ (2018, 373). On Viki, the category does not reiterate and construct otherness at its threshold; rather, it encourages a feeling of recognition and similarity, framing and organising East Asian television through a diverse range of genre categories that are recognisable to Western audiences. Viki does not use an algorithm in the same way as Netflix; it does not use view- ing history to personalise its homepage for individual users. Consequently, it is not structured by consumption proximity in the same way as an algorithmically organ- ised service. However, I argue that ‘taste’ is still a prominent factor in our engage- ment with the Viki interface. On Viki, taste formations are clearly visible and displayed in the ‘fan collections’ category, accessible through the category menu on the homepage. This page displays a range of collections that have been curated by users on the service – as Viki describes it in a subheading, they are ‘handpicked shows by fans for fans’. The titles of these categories vary: some simply fore- ground a fan’s favorite shows, such as ‘Enjoy watching!’ or ‘The Best of Dramas’; others reiterate standard national or genre categories, such as ‘K-drama and Chill’ or ‘Vampire Dramas’. Derek Kompare sees fan curation as creating pathways of 28  Translating and Receiving Korean Media access, operating ‘in service of bringing new people into the fandom’ (2018, 107). Charlotte Stevens, in a reflection on curating vidshows (collections of fanvids to be screened for fellow fans), similarly understands the act of curation as providing a path but sees this as predominantly an interpretive path – in her case study, one that guided viewers through the pleasures of vampire films and television (2017). Following Kompare and Stevens, we can see fan curation as establishing its own kind of threshold encounter, one that sets up parameters for entry into a particular fan culture or fan text. Yet in Viki’s fan collections, the path that each curated cat- egory invites us to follow is a path through the taste of the creator. Indeed, some categories make this connection between curation and taste even more obvious, explicitly referencing different appetites: ‘La Créme de la Créme Culinary Dra- mas’, or ‘Insanely Hot Guys’. Consequently, Viki’s fan collections become a site for experiencing otherness, in which we are invited to cross a threshold into the different personal tastes of different users. By marking out each fan collection as a separately authored taste formation, this section of Viki’s interface invites us to browse a varied buffet of different tastes. Conclusion To conclude, I want to return to where I began this chapter, with a brief discussion of the cultural politics embedded in streaming marketing campaigns. In 2022, Viki released a commercial titled ‘When K-Dramas Watch You’, which depicts a West- ern woman watching a conversation between a Korean couple. After the couple question why the woman is watching them, she replies that she is simply ‘watching some Viki’. A simplistic Viki interface suddenly appears on the screen around each of the couple’s faces, framing them within a pale-blue rectangle with playback con- trols, a running time, view options, and the Viki logo in the corner. As the couple grapple with the rectangular interface, attempting to remove it from their faces, the Western viewer is joined by a translator and editor, who translate the couple’s dialogue and provide cultural context for specific phrases or terms. Like the Netflix commercial that I discussed at the beginning of this chapter, Viki presents their service as a form of cultural encounter, one that allows users to access and under- stand a foreign language and culture. The commercial explicitly and overtly ties this encounter to the interface itself, for it is the sudden emergence of the interface that allows the woman to gain a deeper understanding of both the couple’s words and their meaning. On Netflix and Viki, it is the interface that plays the most important in shap- ing what kind of transnational, transcultural encounter we have with the inter- national television we consume. On Netflix UK, the category reiterates national borders and boundaries, marking out Korean programmes as foreign and separate from the unmarked Western default; on Viki, the category aligns Korean televi- sion with internationally familiar genre categories. On Netflix, taste becomes a self-reiterating loop in which our own preferences are mirrored back to us; on Viki, taste is an encounter with the other – the taste preferences and appetites of differ- ent users, explicitly marked out as such. Western viewers navigating both services Taste at the interface  29 engage in Ju’s transcultural consumption, structured by a pattern of otherness and similarity. The specific nature of these encounters and these patterns, however, will be different depending on the service we use, the interfaces we navigate, and our own tastes. References Ang, Ien. 2004. “The Cultural Intimacy of TV Drama.” In Feeling Asian Modernities: Transnational Consumption of Japanese TV Dramas, edited by K. 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