On Translation, Bilingualism, and Squid Game

I was almost two, and it was altogether a more innocent time, when my family immigrated from Kyiv to Chicago. Reagan was the president-elect, and Disco Demolition Night in Comiskey Park only a few months in the rearview. In those days, my babblings came out in Russian, but, within a few short years, English would steadily conquer my mind through osmosis, mostly by means of the Zenith television set. I distinctly remember the first time I unexpectedly—and rather miraculously—understood the English of my adopted land. I was four years old, watching a gripping episode of Tom and Jerry, and the humans were arguing.

From there on, it was smooth sailing to native-speakerhood. In kindergarten I bit a guy with my baby teeth because he was getting too much attention, and thus, I became a full-fledged American. But my family’s Russian was ever present, sometimes deep in my viscera, sometimes right at the surface, alongside my English. You see, the thing about immigrating as an infant is that your parents’ language continues to grow inside you, but its growth is stunted. The language of your home, your childhood, your parents and grandparents, becomes the language of your most buried childhood emotions. Your grammar is all wrong and you can barely read and write, but the language of your first words—which is actually your second language now—is something cherished.

It wasn’t until many, many years later in life that I started studying a third language in a formal setting. I remember walking into the classroom and seeing four new Spanish words on the blackboard—hola, profesor, profesora, adiós. The seventh-grade teacher had short poofy hair and went from pupil to pupil, making us, individually, repeat each word after her. After that, I took Spanish all the way through college, where I also studied Russian. And years later, I fell into translating—first as a proofreader, then eventually as a literary translator.

It’s almost a cliché to say you feel like a different person when you speak in a different language. There are studies that examine this phenomenon. I can say, truly, that I’ve been several people. But this was particularly the case before I became a translator, when each language seemed to occupy its own discrete sphere of my brain. The more I translated, the more these spheres merged, like a Venn diagram, with the distinct-language parts of me becoming more and more integrated into a unified whole.

One reason for this, I think, is that translation involves working with two languages at the same time, continuously switching back and forth between the source and target texts. In immersive language learning or everyday speaking or reading, you use one language at a time, while excluding any others, at least from the forefront of your mind.

Something else distinguishes people who grow up bilingually from translators. Bilinguals tend to have very good language skills, but those skills are often uneven—a strong ability to talk about home and family life, for example, but less competency with higher-register speech, including formal or specialized discourse or complex syntax. With translators who learned their language outside their home, it can be the opposite, as their language learning is often limited to “proper” grammar and speech, without much emphasis on colloquialisms, slang, idioms, childlike language, or tone of voice.

There are fault lines between translators and bilinguals who don’t translate, and simply knowing a language does not always give someone enough expertise to judge a translation. Take, for example, the controversy over the hit dystopian Netflix show from South Korea, Squid Game. In 2022, comedian Youngmi Mayer made a TikTok video that set off a major brouhaha. Bilingual writers piled on with articles lambasting what they described as a terrible, no-good, very bad translation.

Mayer said the definition of gganbu was all wrong in Episode Six. In the scene where it appears, the characters are playing a child’s game, and as always in the first season, whoever loses the game will die. Player One, an old man, is about to voluntarily give up his life for his friend; he says you “share everything” with your gganbu, even your life. But according to Mayer, the word gganbu implies something much deeper than simply sharing. If we are each other’s gganbu, she says, “there is no ownership between me and you, not ‘we share everything.’”

My first quibble with Mayer’s response is that it doesn’t take into account register, which is an important concept in translation. Simply put: a child should sound like a child, and a rocket scientist should sound like a rocket scientist. In theory, the concept of “no ownership” is stronger than simply being willing to share, but at this critical life-and-death moment, sharing is a plainer, more childlike thing to express, and gganbu is meant to be a child’s word. “No ownership” sounds like Marxist theory. This translation, at this all-important point in the narrative, felt touching, at least to me. If the translators had used the “no ownership” idea, it might have come off as overly intellectual, detracting from the beautiful moment between these two characters.

Having said that, as a professional translator who speaks no Korean, I am convinced, after reading a number of articles about the show, that there’s something extra-special about the word gganbu—so the translators made a good decision when they left it in Korean. Not only is it a sign of respect for the Korean language to leave such a unique word in the original, but it also drops a hint to viewers: the meaning of this word is somehow distinct from close friend, and they must intuit some extra connotation from context.

I wonder if what really underlies the debate is that, to the bilingual Korean critics of the show, the Korean language itself occupies a special place in their hearts, and an English version could never compare, no matter how carefully rendered. I know that my own heritage language has always been more closely connected to my emotions. Numerous researchers have examined the link between emotions and bilingualism. The most recent studies tend to shy away from blanket assertions about bilinguals, recognizing the complexity and diversity of the bilingual experience, but according to a 2022 study in the journal Languages, “The most frequent claim is that the native or first language . . . is a stronghold for emotions due to early childhood development.” However, the phenomenon varied, depending on, among other things, the age at which a bilingual acquired their second language.

Of course there are exceptions. Another article concluded, “When a childhood in one language lacked affection or was marked by distressing events, then bilinguals may prefer to express emotion in their second language.”

I can’t jump into the minds of these critics or conduct a personalized scientific study of their psychospiritual relationship with their languages, but I know that for many bilinguals, including myself, our heritage language is connected more firmly to our emotions; nevertheless, as a translator I must remember that my target and source languages can both express emotions equally, each in their own way. I wonder if the bilingual critics of Squid Game are, in part, starting from a denial of English’s specialness.

All children, no matter what language they speak, experience the beauty of heartfelt friendship. In English, the ultimate expression of that beauty, if I think about it, is to say, “We share everything.” Your kindergarten teacher says, “Now, now, Johnny! We share.” And I can think of no other phrase connected to friendship that would have the same childlike emotional resonance for English-speaking viewers.

When I was in kindergarten, I remember saying, “Johnny, if you don’t share that cookie with me, I’m going to bite you with my baby teeth.” (Okay, okay, that last part may have been a slight fabrication.) For the record, I thought that the translators of Season One did a fantastic job. The show’s mega-success is a testament to the craft of translation—a craft that is related to, but not the same as, the craft of writing. Knowing languages is only one element of that craft.