Squid Game Subtitles 'Change Meaning' of Netflix Show

According to fluent Korean speaker Youngmi Mayer, Squid Game features 'botched' subtitles that have changed the show's meaning for English-speaking viewers.

For those unaware of Squid Game, it's a Korean-language drama about an alternative world where people in debt compete in deadly games. The plot sees a group of people tempted into a survival game where they have the chance to walk away with 45.6 billion Korean won ($38 million) if they win a series of six games. According to a BBC article, it's currently on track to become Netflix's biggest original series. From the report: 'The dialogue was so well written and zero of it was preserved [in the subtitles],' Youngmi said in a Twitter post. In a TikTok video that's had almost nine million views, Youngmi gave several examples of mistranslation. In one scene a character tries to convince people to play the game with her, and the closed-caption subtitles read: 'I'm not a genius, but I still got it worked out.' But what the character actually says, Youngmi explains, is: 'I am very smart, I just never got a chance to study.' That translation puts more emphasis on the wealth disparity in society -- which is also a theme in the Oscar-winning 2019 Korean film, Parasite. 'Almost everything she says is being botched translation-wise... the writers, all they want you to know about her is that,' Youngmi said. '[It] seems so small, but it's the entire character's purpose of being in the show.' Youngmi later clarifies that her initial comments were about the automatically generated closed-caption subtitles rather than the English language subtitles, which are 'substantially better.' But she added: 'The misses in the metaphors -- and what the writers were trying to actually say -- are still pretty present.'

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