Ask: In TotNT Episode 4, when Rang and Yeon meet and Rang tastes Yeon’s ice cream, how does he describe the taste in Korean? Because there were a lot of different translations: chocolate and parsley, chocolate and red beans, chocolate and toothpaste, and the funniest one was chocolate and pain relief patch. Thank you :)
Oh, I love this. And wow, I knew there were a lot of translations out there but there were more than I thought!
The answer is D: chocolate and pain relief patch! 파스 (pa-seu) haha He’s referring to the cooling menthol in it.
‘Parsley’ in Korean is literally just 파슬리 (pa-seul-li), so kind of close, but I definitely don’t hear a final ‘li,’ and also they taste nothing alike (to me). ‘Red beans’ I understand insofar as they’re also pronounced ‘pat’ which transforms to ‘pas-eul’ when combined with the object particle ‘uel/reul’ (팥 → 팥을), but they really taste nothing like mint so that makes zero sense. ‘Toothpaste’ I would actually give a pass from a cultural translation standpoint if the translator didn’t think ‘pain relief patch’ would come across to an international audience. And to be fair, Korean people who don’t like mint chocolate also commonly describe it as tasting like toothpaste. Linguistically, though, it’s the farthest since the word for toothpaste is ‘chiyak’ (치약). Sorry if that was more info than you ever wanted haha.
Something I didn’t know before TotNT is that apparently there’s a really inane subculture war surrounding mint chocolate flavored things in Korea, and it’s big enough that even stars like IU and BTS’s RM have weighed in on it. So I guess Yeon liking it and Rang hating it is a nod to a larger and very childish subcultural divide pfft
Answered on tumblr here.
Also, since we’re here, tvN and other media outlets actually published multiple video edits on the subject, and I’d like to congratulate the editors because they’re pretty funny. Below are two from tvN. The second one is framed as a news bulletin lol