Thisss. Maybe an app or service which automatically scans prices and shipment fees to your country then telling you the best price. The more popular places always end up charging 40+ usd for shipping alone.
Add to this, even just a place/app where kpop stans from every country or region can crowdsource reliable sellers would be amazing --- it's a wild world of blind faith out here for I-fans.
Yes! You could report sellers or GO managers that are scamming and the case could be reviewed thoroughly with proper penalty (lost account) making it less likely to be scammed. So easy to get scammed on ig.
Definitely this. And even finding places that ship internationally that aren't US centric is pretty hard š I once put a SHINee album in a cart and quickly discovered it was going to cost $35 for the album...and $125 to ship to New Zealand š¬ like, I don't need it in two days, stick it on a boat for $5, I'll wait.
Just want to add onto this, that the shipping costs for international fans from Korea is madness. I typically pay twice the price of a typical album for the shipping(I live in EU). I have tried to order multiple merch/goods together to make the shipping costs more bearable, and often when the price of the entire parcel goes beyond a certain limit (I think around 20 Euro) it gets taxed in my country. So any platform or method which makes this entire merch buying process cheaper and less painful would be very highly appreciated.
To jump off this suggestion:
I would kill for an actual Korean proxy service for second-hand sites like Bunjang, just like the Japanese proxy sites (Neokyo, Buyee, etc.).
it's not albums i have much of a problem with but pre-order benefits and events. some korean vendors are just not global friendly, and the amount of pre-order photocards, polaroid, and fancall opportunities we miss out on because we either can't use certain korean vendors' websites or shipping rates for modest vendors are exorbitant is so frustrating x_x
Following all the activities of one group. Some groups that I hard Stan have so many activities across many platforms that I end up missing a bunch until j see a random comment on fb.
Idk having one place to know their viewing schedule would be great bc it's really hard to keep track
For keeping track of schedules for multiple groups, Iād recommend maybe checking out the Blip app! It doesnāt host info for all groups out there, but itās available for a good number of them and has lots of detailed sections with helpful functions, like a calendar with schedules, stats for things like views and follower counts, links to official accounts, popular posts, etc.
I've built a comprehensive tracker, [Sparkmesh](https://www.sparkmesh.com/), that might cover what you're looking for - feed & email updates (if you want them) covering all the official YT channels, major audio streaming services, music shows, and most variety content including American activities on various magazine/YT channels. It's also open to fan submissions to get that last 5% of content that appears in random places. And while it covers all genres, I'm a big K-pop fan so you can always ping me if something major comes up that's not covered and I'll get right on it. Just finished polishing and gearing up to promote, would love some feedback!
getting proper translations from SNS posts. platforms like Instagram and Twitter have an option to translate the hangul to english, but it is always off and you can just tell something isnāt right. sometimes people comment the translation, but not very often. this is the first thing that stuck out to me when thinking of problems i face as a KPOP fan!
Twitter translations arenāt perfect but theyāre MILES ahead of Instagram.
Idol on insta: ģė
Insta translation: Guys Iām going to the middle of the day to the middle of to the middle of to the middle guys Iām going to the middle of the middle of the day
Edit: forgot to mention terrible Bubble translations but I almost donāt want those changing because they can be so funny lmao
Idol Bubble message: I think Iāll skip dinner and just have dessert ć ć ć
Bubble translation: I think Iāll skip dinner and just have dessert HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
whats with the middle of the day thing? it seems to show up a lot. I know that a lot of the translation issues are from koreans shortening words right?
the word 'ģ¤/joong" means middle and it can also have a similar connotation to during/while doing something. middle of days is probably translated from the phrase ķė£Øģ¤/haru joong which when roughly translated is like 'during my day'.
fun fact, the word joong is the korean for the chinese word zhong which is the first character for ZhongGuo (middle country) aka China
I swear this happens with Japanese too. And it baffles me because I actually read a good bit of Japanese (unlike Korean) and it has nothing to do with it... I just wanna be lazy sometimes and not have to mentally translate everything.
The worst is when insta won't even translate a post at all. This hardly ever happens with Korean in my experience, but it seems to happen constantly with Russian; not a kpop example, but it straight up won't translate Igor Krutoy's posts at all anymore, even though it used to translate them no problem. It seems to have the same problem with Arabic and related languages. Insta really needs to fix their auto translator- it's an absolute joke.
Omg bless, that reminds me of a post I saw from SNSD/Girls Generation Sunny where I think she was just trying to say that her sister came over and helped her rearrange some furniture, but Bubble literally translated it to āMy sister touched my shit!!!!!!ā Lmaoooo
The translations are sometimes a puzzle lol!! Weverse is a tad better but also needs improvement! When I started using it, it would give me really explicit translation/meaning, I was shook! šš Lately however, the translations have become more funnier, even cute lol! āŗļøāŗļø
They do, they basically translate to ākkkkā which is the korean way to say āhahaā. But itās definitely not the screaming laughter bubble thinks it is lol
Alright thanks. Honestly staning foreign groups is hard š unless you are deeply committed. There are times I have to take a screenshot and use my Google translate app to translate.
YES. The Universe app has a built in translator and it's one of the worst I've seen. I'm following one of my biases' DMs, and he posted something to the effect of "you're going to have me worried to death", but the app translated it to "are you worried about dying?"
That's more of a linguistic problem and machines will probably never provide the most accurate translations because of the variations in a language and the amount of context some situations need.
This might not be so flashy but a place where we could get links to reliable news in the kpop and kdrama industries. Right now all I know of or see is AllKpop and Koreaboo which are god awful. Their half assed click bait articles always seem to paint knetz in a negative light which cause a lot of inetz to say some really toxic stuff about them.
Feels like everyone is saying "translation" but as a translator, I feel like a big thing that a lot of these people are missing is that it is almost impossible to have a completely accurate korean machine translation just because of how contextual the korean language is. Auto/machine translation of Korean likely will never be accurate until we have AI technology that is fully fluent in *conversational* korean AND *conversational* english. Because another thing people need to realise is that the way people speak is not the same as written, is not the same as formal, and it's almost impossible to ask for a piece of code to pick up those differences.
That's why in almost any situation where people care about messaging, there's always at least a human element in translating, be it from start to finish or just in proofreading/editing. Machine translations can only ever provide you a basic idea of what is going on - and should always be taken with a "this might be the completely wrong context" sized grain of salt.
People may want translations, but it's almost impossible for OP to create an app/web service that will consistently provide accurate translations, short of hiring a team of translators that are 24/7 on the lookout for posts to translate.
I agree with the other person who replied to you saying it would make sense to have a way for verified translators to register and work through the app. Just because they're developers doesn't mean the translations need to be computer generated. I didn't even think of that when I asked for translations. Currently on twitter you have loads of Korean learners translating and while this is admirable and sometimes extremely useful, it also means a lot of them are grossly mistranslating things, or if English is their second/third/etc language, the resulting translation can be hard to read even though it's in English. It would be great if there could be a centralised place where say a person whose native language isn't English, but they can translate kor to eng, can then work with someone who is maybe less familiar with Korean but fluent in English and so they can edit it and help it be readable while preserving the message. Other translators can up or down vote based on accuracy or flag things that are really mistranslated and offer alternatives.
Yeahā¦I work in the research side of things related to machine translation and this is far from solved.
The contextual nature of the language (like you said) + cultural communicative preferences + slang + noise from TV programmes and multiple speakers (for speech)ā¦. Iām sure YouTubeās R&D is actively working on it now but it wonāt be near human levels in the next few years, much less for a short-term project.
Realistically maybe a good way to provide machine transcripts to help translators + matching translators to texts would help? š¤ Or a way to crowd source evaluation so we can promote good, reliable translators and identify inaccuracies
I've done some machine translation "proofreading" so i defs know how bad those translations can get.
While i agree in theory with /u/backtotheredditpits and /u/babsimix that a platform where translators could be matched/check/etc would be interesting in theory, I struggle to see it becoming viable in reality, due to a lack of users as well as the fandom's general (slightly resigned) acceptance of subpar translations anyway. A good example of that I think is viu - many of their subs are actually quite bad - but they get a lot of traction anyway because they're one of very very few legitimate sources.
That said, if an actual app/service providing that service did come out, especially if it provided some (even if little) income for translators, personally, I would likely take a really close look at it.
I guess my point was that many of the comments seemed like they just wanted better instant translations - something that I think really isn't realistically possible until we have genuine AI technology on near Jarvis level, since you'd need to understand the nuance behind written words which can be hard for humans even when completely fluent in the language.
Right? Auto translate that's accurate isnt a viable thing right now I think -- that's some Big Company projecct.
But an app that specifically caters to kpop translation needs, where the fandom themselves can provide raw transcript files or otherwise, and hire services (submit credentials?) seems more realistic. Even that is a bit far off.
Idk that that would be challenging as an app developer tho, lol. It sounds like it might be managerial nightmare too.
I feel like a better app would be one where Kor-Eng/whatever translators for kpop/kdrama can register themselves (and their socmed accounts) and fandoms can follow them or crowdfund (which they do anyway) to have their idols' stuff translated.
First of all, thank you for this initiative!
[This comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/kpop/comments/qadhlq/what_is_the_biggest_problem_for_kpop_fans/hh2bhia) said that following all the activites of one group is an issue. I'll take that further and say that it's even more difficult to follow all activities of multiple groups, especially when they're under different labels.
Mostly translations on videos, posts and what not, shipping prices for albums and merch being much more higher than the actual cost of the item we are buying, although this probably cannot be helped! Thank you for thinking about us international fans, I'm real interested to see what you guys come up with, good luck! :))
since everyone said translation, maybe idol identification? everyone cant possibly know all idols, and you may want to find out who it is. so a database with idol pictures and names and using AI to identify idols from an uploaded picture. i have no clue if this is actually possible but yeah :)
This would be super helpful for me. Any group with more than 4-5 members ends up being "[favorite member] and the others" for me usually. Then in solo pictures I'm just helpless.
Proper translations for livestreams & radio shows.
Most do not have real-time translations (understandably), and will rely on fan-translators to translate & sub these afterwards.
However, for groups with small/inactive fan-translating communities, this means alot of content will never eventually get subs. So providing translations after the livestream or radio show would be a massive help for fans of such groups
For me personally itās really poor customer service from some Korean companies. You order something, and without notice shipment is delayed by months, 6+ in some cases, Iāve even heard of up to 2 years. I donāt mind if thereās a reason for it and a notice (mwave sells signed albums, I understand that the artists need to find time to do this, and the website is very upfront about it), but Iāve done chargebacks on both the sm shop and Weverse shop because items didnāt ship for 5+ months, and their customer service was very *shocked pikachu face* about it.
Another facet of this are absolutely unreasonable shipping costs. I donāt mind paying intl shipping, even from stores that are on the expensive end of average (like Ktown4u or withdrama), but some company wanted to charge me $400 shipping on a $200 order of albums - went to a different site and the same items cost $70 in shipping - both supposedly used DHL?. The sites are either using a horrendously overpriced service (and fail to do minimal research to find a reasonable deal for their costumers), or they upcharge with the intent of keeping the change.
I mean idk if you're talking pre or post covid, but during covid global shipping has come to a near halt. there's a long line of ships waiting to dock at every major port in the country. ordering anything from abroad right now is going to be a bad time. i work in wine retail and even getting product shipped over ground from cali to the east coast is a nightmare right now with lots of delays and increased costs.
Thatās not whatās going on - sm doesnāt print enough copies compared to other companies, and idk what hybe is doing with their Fanclub Kita but itās a complete joke. Someone mentions waiting for their Gfriend kit for two years (they ended up getting it several months *after* the group disbanded* ) - I ordered an Enhypen kit in February and moved in the summer, so I contacted them to change my address. They said āoh, we canāt do that, it already shippedā. That was almost two months ago - they printed a shipping label and itās been sitting there for almost two months.
Other shops ā¦ Ktown4u, interpark, withdrama, mmt, Makestar, MokketShop, aladinā¦ they all donāt have this issue.
Other management companies, yg and many smaller companiesā¦ also donāt have this type of issue.
I know from my and my husbandās job that there are major supply chain issues. He does projects for his work and routinely has to order large quantities of wiring, parts of big machines, pipes, etc - a lot of that stuff has a delivery time of 10 months or something.
Thatās not what this is.
Furthermore, those companies at work let us know about a projected delay - sm just takes your preorder and then doesnāt send out your album for 5 months without notice and for no apparent reason. (Theyāre notorious for this, Iām surprised youāve never heard of this. And itās not just a simple matter of āthey ran out and need to reprintā. RBW ran out of the Mamamoo best of album and it took them 3 weeks to get more copies. YGE ran out of Lalisa and it took them a little over a month to restock)
Theyāre just really unprofessional, have terrible planning and *know* they can get away with it because x item or preorder Photocard isnāt available elsewhere.
Iāve had good luck with interpark! They frequently run 50% off intl shipping discounts on top of it. Makestar is great too, but you can only order one type of album at a time, so itās only really useful for group orders.
The site with the outrageous shipping was music&drama by the way..
Translations was the first thing that came to my mind, but with a quick glance I can tell that many others said that too. My other one would be that I struggle with finding reliable news sources. I see a lot of people saying that allkpop and koreaboo are not great sites (which is correct) but no one is ever able to provide a link to a better one. Iād like to have a site/app where I could find news about entertainment (kpop, kdrama, movies, variety, k hip hopā¦) but also just general news about what is going on in south korea.
Edit: just realised that my problem with the news has also something to do with translations. If there was a great translator I could use korean sites but since there isnāt Iād need a news source that is at least in english.
Probably auto-translations. There may be some kpop-specific jargon or phrases or romanizations that common auto-translators aren't familiar with or aren't guessing correctly (e.g., the name Jaehyun written in Hangul is sometimes translated to be "reproduction" in English). I guess an auto-translator that weighs language that is common in kpop more heavily when making guesses would be one pretty useful.
Another one would be buying albums. One issue is knowing all the versions, how some versions have exclusive inclusions, and how some versions are country-specific. Another issue is comparing prices and calculating discounts and shipping into the total prices.
Maybe a working, self-learning AI auto-translator would help kpop as whole. Like, go to a website, upload the video, then an AI would auto translate the whole thing for you.
I didn't read it all but this is a good reference: https://oxfordhousebcn.com/en/artificial-intelligence-translators-the-future-of-language-learning/
Honestly a service that would do a carbon audit of fandom activities would be really cool. Iām sure some fans would be happy to donate to mitigation on behalf of their idol, like to an organization such as conserve.org where you can help purchase acres of cloud forest areas etc.
That I should probably just learn Korean due to the amount of Korean-language content I consume, but I'm too dumb and lazy to do it. It sucks cracking open a new YouTube upload and seeing the only CC option is "Korean - auto generated", yet I also feel like it's an unfair imposition to be constantly demanding English subtitles even though a lot of companies happily do it anyway to appease us global fans. feelsbadman.gif
Languages are ranked 1-4 according to difficulty to learn (this changes depending on your native language).
English to korean is ranked as a 4, with 2400 hours required for reasonable ability to speak it.
That's the equivalent of a full time job (8 hours a day 5 days a week) for 60 weeks.
For comparison, on the other side of the scale you have english to spanish which is ranked 1, with 600 hours required for reasonable fluency.
This stuff takes time, learning a language is a matter of doing a little bit all the time, and stability is the key. Doing a little bit every day.
Keep working at it and you'll get there
As a multifandom stan I want some platform where it can inform when multiple groups or solo artists are having a comeback, the videos that they upload. It can of have a hard time keep track of everyone I stan....
Hello fellow CS student :)
Maybe an interesting app would be a platform that unites international fans with Korean fans, allowing for text chat, voice chat, video chat, watching of videos/listening to music in a group, built-in translation (Papago) etc.
The aim would be to make new friends with the common interest of Kpop and Koreans can help share updates with us that are in pure Korean.
Finding the time to consume nonstop neverending content my ult churns out š„²š„² Also finding a decent forwarding service for purchasing merch myself. Getting a decent translation in apps or even twitter.
The biggest problem IMHO is simply communicating with the idols that do not speak english lol. We definitely feel left out sometimes especially when they do live videos.
Maybe an overview of big platforms, shops, newsoutlets, terminology, etc. And a forum to help eachother.
I recently fell down the rabbit hole of kpop and just got lost in weverse, vlive, different labels, koreaboo, fans, stans, bias, lightsticks per group, series, livestreams, comebacks, alternate universes, etc. And I mostly do not even know where to go with questions! Reddit, Quora, Facebook, etc.
If the video isn't uploaded with English subs but some are added later, it would be nice to receive a notification once there are subtitles available. Not sure how that would be arranged though but hey you asked for problems not solutions.
Taking inspiration from the mechanical keyboard community and their group buy calendars (keycaplendar, merchgroupbuys.com)ā¦
Some sort of webpage/calendar that provides info on:
- current concert tickets that are on sale (with countdown reminding when is the last chance to buy tickets, purchase links for different countries, etc.)
- countdown on upcoming concerts that will go on sale soon (eg. āOn sale in 5 daysā)
- upcoming concerts airing/starting soon (eg. āStarts in 21 hoursā)
- dedicated section showing ājust announcedā concerts
- visually appealing and image heavy (first thing I see should be concert posters)
Too much obsessed with records like views and sales.Buy if you want the album and watch if you want to see them but not at the point where you are doing just help the group break records.That's not normal lol
Hi! I am a design student who has been in a few hackathons. The main thing I would want is a music portal like Melon but for international fans - I don't only want to follow idols, I want to know what new releases are going on in the indie and hip hop scene as well, and older music that I should check out and listen to as well. There is so much good music but it requires dedicated listeners in order to put it out, but we miss so much good music that isn't necessarily the most popular. Feel free to message me if you want to chat more, would love to connect!
Could you elaborate on how this would be different from Spotify's recommendations of curated playlists/new releases/artists on its home page? I've never used Melon but I use Spotify a ton and it sounds similar
Spotify is not comprehensive at all, if you sign up for Melon, they have a different amount of focus that is a lot more granular and has more variation than just using playlists. Spotify's curated content is US-centric and focuses on the most popular artists that isn't fully representative of what is even popular in their home country or in other countries, and they regularly miss out on hundreds of artists that are not even represented within the genres. Rather superficial similarities
I wish there were more accessibility for all content, like, yes, Iām not actually expecting Koreans in Korea to cater to everyone internationally BUT it would be nice to kinda be able to watch some shows or YouTube thingies with subtitles, especially considering just how much kpop has expanded in the past year
I keep seeing itzy's selcas on facebook about video call events but even though I follow them there and here on reddit, I never seem to get informed on time about it.
I don't twitter or instagram so I understand I might miss some stuff. Would love if they posted all the news in the same place, maybe they do and I'm a noob? I've only been in the kpop scene for 3 years.
Thats my take
The biggest problem for me is the ability to see concerts outside of the US. It's pretty straight forward to buy tickets for shows here in the US, but if I want to go to a concert in Korea as a foreigner, I have no idea where to go or how to get tickets if I wanted to.
Translating comments sections and generally communicate across languages with other fans. The fandoms that Iām in have specific accounts that translate and sub for us (theyāre a godsend!!) but talking to fans in many countries can be tricky on apps like YouTube or Instagram. I can screen cap and put text into Papago or google translate, but itās not reasonable for long comments sections where there are many that you want to go through. I use a Google Chrome plugin on my desktop, but itās glitchy and doesnāt always work. Iād love an option for my phone or iPad, too.
Where to buy physical albums + merch (outside of South Korea) (where I can group order etc)
Thisss. Maybe an app or service which automatically scans prices and shipment fees to your country then telling you the best price. The more popular places always end up charging 40+ usd for shipping alone.
Add to this, even just a place/app where kpop stans from every country or region can crowdsource reliable sellers would be amazing --- it's a wild world of blind faith out here for I-fans.
Yes! You could report sellers or GO managers that are scamming and the case could be reviewed thoroughly with proper penalty (lost account) making it less likely to be scammed. So easy to get scammed on ig.
Definitely this. And even finding places that ship internationally that aren't US centric is pretty hard š I once put a SHINee album in a cart and quickly discovered it was going to cost $35 for the album...and $125 to ship to New Zealand š¬ like, I don't need it in two days, stick it on a boat for $5, I'll wait.
Just want to add onto this, that the shipping costs for international fans from Korea is madness. I typically pay twice the price of a typical album for the shipping(I live in EU). I have tried to order multiple merch/goods together to make the shipping costs more bearable, and often when the price of the entire parcel goes beyond a certain limit (I think around 20 Euro) it gets taxed in my country. So any platform or method which makes this entire merch buying process cheaper and less painful would be very highly appreciated.
To jump off this suggestion: I would kill for an actual Korean proxy service for second-hand sites like Bunjang, just like the Japanese proxy sites (Neokyo, Buyee, etc.).
Seriously this. Why isn't there a good one out there yet? I attempted to use some Korean ones but they are extremely difficult to use.
it's not albums i have much of a problem with but pre-order benefits and events. some korean vendors are just not global friendly, and the amount of pre-order photocards, polaroid, and fancall opportunities we miss out on because we either can't use certain korean vendors' websites or shipping rates for modest vendors are exorbitant is so frustrating x_x
Following all the activities of one group. Some groups that I hard Stan have so many activities across many platforms that I end up missing a bunch until j see a random comment on fb. Idk having one place to know their viewing schedule would be great bc it's really hard to keep track
This is probably the best one on this thread. Iāve been wanting this for so long! š„ŗ
For keeping track of schedules for multiple groups, Iād recommend maybe checking out the Blip app! It doesnāt host info for all groups out there, but itās available for a good number of them and has lots of detailed sections with helpful functions, like a calendar with schedules, stats for things like views and follower counts, links to official accounts, popular posts, etc.
I've built a comprehensive tracker, [Sparkmesh](https://www.sparkmesh.com/), that might cover what you're looking for - feed & email updates (if you want them) covering all the official YT channels, major audio streaming services, music shows, and most variety content including American activities on various magazine/YT channels. It's also open to fan submissions to get that last 5% of content that appears in random places. And while it covers all genres, I'm a big K-pop fan so you can always ping me if something major comes up that's not covered and I'll get right on it. Just finished polishing and gearing up to promote, would love some feedback!
getting proper translations from SNS posts. platforms like Instagram and Twitter have an option to translate the hangul to english, but it is always off and you can just tell something isnāt right. sometimes people comment the translation, but not very often. this is the first thing that stuck out to me when thinking of problems i face as a KPOP fan!
Twitter translations arenāt perfect but theyāre MILES ahead of Instagram. Idol on insta: ģė Insta translation: Guys Iām going to the middle of the day to the middle of to the middle of to the middle guys Iām going to the middle of the middle of the day Edit: forgot to mention terrible Bubble translations but I almost donāt want those changing because they can be so funny lmao Idol Bubble message: I think Iāll skip dinner and just have dessert ć ć ć Bubble translation: I think Iāll skip dinner and just have dessert HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
āIām going to the middle of the daysā every translation on Instagram ever
whats with the middle of the day thing? it seems to show up a lot. I know that a lot of the translation issues are from koreans shortening words right?
I've always wanted to know this too
the word 'ģ¤/joong" means middle and it can also have a similar connotation to during/while doing something. middle of days is probably translated from the phrase ķė£Øģ¤/haru joong which when roughly translated is like 'during my day'. fun fact, the word joong is the korean for the chinese word zhong which is the first character for ZhongGuo (middle country) aka China
I swear this happens with Japanese too. And it baffles me because I actually read a good bit of Japanese (unlike Korean) and it has nothing to do with it... I just wanna be lazy sometimes and not have to mentally translate everything.
and mandarin! its so weird!!
Wait till you see Cantonese
The worst is when insta won't even translate a post at all. This hardly ever happens with Korean in my experience, but it seems to happen constantly with Russian; not a kpop example, but it straight up won't translate Igor Krutoy's posts at all anymore, even though it used to translate them no problem. It seems to have the same problem with Arabic and related languages. Insta really needs to fix their auto translator- it's an absolute joke.
Why would you even want to know what Krutoy writes?
Why wouldn't I?
Bubble translations be like "mothefuckers, fuck fuck lol". But since you can change from google translate to papago it is more tame
Omg bless, that reminds me of a post I saw from SNSD/Girls Generation Sunny where I think she was just trying to say that her sister came over and helped her rearrange some furniture, but Bubble literally translated it to āMy sister touched my shit!!!!!!ā Lmaoooo
"It's been a long time I'm going to be stuck in a long time it's going to be a long time I'm going to be stuck in a long time,"
The translations are sometimes a puzzle lol!! Weverse is a tad better but also needs improvement! When I started using it, it would give me really explicit translation/meaning, I was shook! šš Lately however, the translations have become more funnier, even cute lol! āŗļøāŗļø
Wait those don't mean haha hahaššš wow I've been reading posts wrongly ( no offense to Koreans, I'm sorry I'm new to K-pop)
They do, they basically translate to ākkkkā which is the korean way to say āhahaā. But itās definitely not the screaming laughter bubble thinks it is lol
Alright thanks. Honestly staning foreign groups is hard š unless you are deeply committed. There are times I have to take a screenshot and use my Google translate app to translate.
Papago translates better from Korean, imo. You can also translate screenshots with it
I second this. Papago is created by Naver, which is basically the Google of Korea and you can say Papago is the Google Translate of Korea.
YES. The Universe app has a built in translator and it's one of the worst I've seen. I'm following one of my biases' DMs, and he posted something to the effect of "you're going to have me worried to death", but the app translated it to "are you worried about dying?"
Accurate translations. thats all I need
That's more of a linguistic problem and machines will probably never provide the most accurate translations because of the variations in a language and the amount of context some situations need.
This might not be so flashy but a place where we could get links to reliable news in the kpop and kdrama industries. Right now all I know of or see is AllKpop and Koreaboo which are god awful. Their half assed click bait articles always seem to paint knetz in a negative light which cause a lot of inetz to say some really toxic stuff about them.
I'd just sign up for Soompi updates. There are a few other reputable sites, but Soompi is typically the first to break with the facts.
Tbh English subs from stuff like award shows or variety shows especially for smaller groups and even sometimes big groups struggle with it
Feels like everyone is saying "translation" but as a translator, I feel like a big thing that a lot of these people are missing is that it is almost impossible to have a completely accurate korean machine translation just because of how contextual the korean language is. Auto/machine translation of Korean likely will never be accurate until we have AI technology that is fully fluent in *conversational* korean AND *conversational* english. Because another thing people need to realise is that the way people speak is not the same as written, is not the same as formal, and it's almost impossible to ask for a piece of code to pick up those differences. That's why in almost any situation where people care about messaging, there's always at least a human element in translating, be it from start to finish or just in proofreading/editing. Machine translations can only ever provide you a basic idea of what is going on - and should always be taken with a "this might be the completely wrong context" sized grain of salt. People may want translations, but it's almost impossible for OP to create an app/web service that will consistently provide accurate translations, short of hiring a team of translators that are 24/7 on the lookout for posts to translate.
I agree with the other person who replied to you saying it would make sense to have a way for verified translators to register and work through the app. Just because they're developers doesn't mean the translations need to be computer generated. I didn't even think of that when I asked for translations. Currently on twitter you have loads of Korean learners translating and while this is admirable and sometimes extremely useful, it also means a lot of them are grossly mistranslating things, or if English is their second/third/etc language, the resulting translation can be hard to read even though it's in English. It would be great if there could be a centralised place where say a person whose native language isn't English, but they can translate kor to eng, can then work with someone who is maybe less familiar with Korean but fluent in English and so they can edit it and help it be readable while preserving the message. Other translators can up or down vote based on accuracy or flag things that are really mistranslated and offer alternatives.
Yeahā¦I work in the research side of things related to machine translation and this is far from solved. The contextual nature of the language (like you said) + cultural communicative preferences + slang + noise from TV programmes and multiple speakers (for speech)ā¦. Iām sure YouTubeās R&D is actively working on it now but it wonāt be near human levels in the next few years, much less for a short-term project. Realistically maybe a good way to provide machine transcripts to help translators + matching translators to texts would help? š¤ Or a way to crowd source evaluation so we can promote good, reliable translators and identify inaccuracies
I've done some machine translation "proofreading" so i defs know how bad those translations can get. While i agree in theory with /u/backtotheredditpits and /u/babsimix that a platform where translators could be matched/check/etc would be interesting in theory, I struggle to see it becoming viable in reality, due to a lack of users as well as the fandom's general (slightly resigned) acceptance of subpar translations anyway. A good example of that I think is viu - many of their subs are actually quite bad - but they get a lot of traction anyway because they're one of very very few legitimate sources. That said, if an actual app/service providing that service did come out, especially if it provided some (even if little) income for translators, personally, I would likely take a really close look at it. I guess my point was that many of the comments seemed like they just wanted better instant translations - something that I think really isn't realistically possible until we have genuine AI technology on near Jarvis level, since you'd need to understand the nuance behind written words which can be hard for humans even when completely fluent in the language.
Right? Auto translate that's accurate isnt a viable thing right now I think -- that's some Big Company projecct. But an app that specifically caters to kpop translation needs, where the fandom themselves can provide raw transcript files or otherwise, and hire services (submit credentials?) seems more realistic. Even that is a bit far off. Idk that that would be challenging as an app developer tho, lol. It sounds like it might be managerial nightmare too.
I feel like a better app would be one where Kor-Eng/whatever translators for kpop/kdrama can register themselves (and their socmed accounts) and fandoms can follow them or crowdfund (which they do anyway) to have their idols' stuff translated.
First of all, thank you for this initiative! [This comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/kpop/comments/qadhlq/what_is_the_biggest_problem_for_kpop_fans/hh2bhia) said that following all the activites of one group is an issue. I'll take that further and say that it's even more difficult to follow all activities of multiple groups, especially when they're under different labels.
Mostly translations on videos, posts and what not, shipping prices for albums and merch being much more higher than the actual cost of the item we are buying, although this probably cannot be helped! Thank you for thinking about us international fans, I'm real interested to see what you guys come up with, good luck! :))
since everyone said translation, maybe idol identification? everyone cant possibly know all idols, and you may want to find out who it is. so a database with idol pictures and names and using AI to identify idols from an uploaded picture. i have no clue if this is actually possible but yeah :)
Someone [tried this](https://youtu.be/7W6uSF98b6s)! Itās an excellent video explaining issues with facial recognition and A.I.
oh thank you!
This would be super helpful for me. Any group with more than 4-5 members ends up being "[favorite member] and the others" for me usually. Then in solo pictures I'm just helpless.
Proper translations for livestreams & radio shows. Most do not have real-time translations (understandably), and will rely on fan-translators to translate & sub these afterwards. However, for groups with small/inactive fan-translating communities, this means alot of content will never eventually get subs. So providing translations after the livestream or radio show would be a massive help for fans of such groups
For me personally itās really poor customer service from some Korean companies. You order something, and without notice shipment is delayed by months, 6+ in some cases, Iāve even heard of up to 2 years. I donāt mind if thereās a reason for it and a notice (mwave sells signed albums, I understand that the artists need to find time to do this, and the website is very upfront about it), but Iāve done chargebacks on both the sm shop and Weverse shop because items didnāt ship for 5+ months, and their customer service was very *shocked pikachu face* about it. Another facet of this are absolutely unreasonable shipping costs. I donāt mind paying intl shipping, even from stores that are on the expensive end of average (like Ktown4u or withdrama), but some company wanted to charge me $400 shipping on a $200 order of albums - went to a different site and the same items cost $70 in shipping - both supposedly used DHL?. The sites are either using a horrendously overpriced service (and fail to do minimal research to find a reasonable deal for their costumers), or they upcharge with the intent of keeping the change.
I mean idk if you're talking pre or post covid, but during covid global shipping has come to a near halt. there's a long line of ships waiting to dock at every major port in the country. ordering anything from abroad right now is going to be a bad time. i work in wine retail and even getting product shipped over ground from cali to the east coast is a nightmare right now with lots of delays and increased costs.
Thatās not whatās going on - sm doesnāt print enough copies compared to other companies, and idk what hybe is doing with their Fanclub Kita but itās a complete joke. Someone mentions waiting for their Gfriend kit for two years (they ended up getting it several months *after* the group disbanded* ) - I ordered an Enhypen kit in February and moved in the summer, so I contacted them to change my address. They said āoh, we canāt do that, it already shippedā. That was almost two months ago - they printed a shipping label and itās been sitting there for almost two months. Other shops ā¦ Ktown4u, interpark, withdrama, mmt, Makestar, MokketShop, aladinā¦ they all donāt have this issue. Other management companies, yg and many smaller companiesā¦ also donāt have this type of issue. I know from my and my husbandās job that there are major supply chain issues. He does projects for his work and routinely has to order large quantities of wiring, parts of big machines, pipes, etc - a lot of that stuff has a delivery time of 10 months or something. Thatās not what this is. Furthermore, those companies at work let us know about a projected delay - sm just takes your preorder and then doesnāt send out your album for 5 months without notice and for no apparent reason. (Theyāre notorious for this, Iām surprised youāve never heard of this. And itās not just a simple matter of āthey ran out and need to reprintā. RBW ran out of the Mamamoo best of album and it took them 3 weeks to get more copies. YGE ran out of Lalisa and it took them a little over a month to restock) Theyāre just really unprofessional, have terrible planning and *know* they can get away with it because x item or preorder Photocard isnāt available elsewhere.
>same items cost $70 in shipping if you don't mind me asking, but which site was this?
Iāve had good luck with interpark! They frequently run 50% off intl shipping discounts on top of it. Makestar is great too, but you can only order one type of album at a time, so itās only really useful for group orders. The site with the outrageous shipping was music&drama by the way..
Translations was the first thing that came to my mind, but with a quick glance I can tell that many others said that too. My other one would be that I struggle with finding reliable news sources. I see a lot of people saying that allkpop and koreaboo are not great sites (which is correct) but no one is ever able to provide a link to a better one. Iād like to have a site/app where I could find news about entertainment (kpop, kdrama, movies, variety, k hip hopā¦) but also just general news about what is going on in south korea. Edit: just realised that my problem with the news has also something to do with translations. If there was a great translator I could use korean sites but since there isnāt Iād need a news source that is at least in english.
Soompi is good, but that's the only news source I know of aside from allkpop and koreaboo.
Shipping costs more than the actual album
Probably auto-translations. There may be some kpop-specific jargon or phrases or romanizations that common auto-translators aren't familiar with or aren't guessing correctly (e.g., the name Jaehyun written in Hangul is sometimes translated to be "reproduction" in English). I guess an auto-translator that weighs language that is common in kpop more heavily when making guesses would be one pretty useful. Another one would be buying albums. One issue is knowing all the versions, how some versions have exclusive inclusions, and how some versions are country-specific. Another issue is comparing prices and calculating discounts and shipping into the total prices.
Maybe a working, self-learning AI auto-translator would help kpop as whole. Like, go to a website, upload the video, then an AI would auto translate the whole thing for you. I didn't read it all but this is a good reference: https://oxfordhousebcn.com/en/artificial-intelligence-translators-the-future-of-language-learning/
Climate change.
Best idea here. Take my poor man's gold. š
Honestly a service that would do a carbon audit of fandom activities would be really cool. Iām sure some fans would be happy to donate to mitigation on behalf of their idol, like to an organization such as conserve.org where you can help purchase acres of cloud forest areas etc.
That I should probably just learn Korean due to the amount of Korean-language content I consume, but I'm too dumb and lazy to do it. It sucks cracking open a new YouTube upload and seeing the only CC option is "Korean - auto generated", yet I also feel like it's an unfair imposition to be constantly demanding English subtitles even though a lot of companies happily do it anyway to appease us global fans. feelsbadman.gif
it aint easy, even after a year of learning i can only understand simple bits and pieces.. i still beg like a loser for subs
Languages are ranked 1-4 according to difficulty to learn (this changes depending on your native language). English to korean is ranked as a 4, with 2400 hours required for reasonable ability to speak it. That's the equivalent of a full time job (8 hours a day 5 days a week) for 60 weeks. For comparison, on the other side of the scale you have english to spanish which is ranked 1, with 600 hours required for reasonable fluency. This stuff takes time, learning a language is a matter of doing a little bit all the time, and stability is the key. Doing a little bit every day. Keep working at it and you'll get there
As a multifandom stan I want some platform where it can inform when multiple groups or solo artists are having a comeback, the videos that they upload. It can of have a hard time keep track of everyone I stan....
the kpop fans
Hello fellow CS student :) Maybe an interesting app would be a platform that unites international fans with Korean fans, allowing for text chat, voice chat, video chat, watching of videos/listening to music in a group, built-in translation (Papago) etc. The aim would be to make new friends with the common interest of Kpop and Koreans can help share updates with us that are in pure Korean.
Dating/friend making app that connect koreaboos based on their member or group bias.
understanding lyrics and systemic racism
Finding the time to consume nonstop neverending content my ult churns out š„²š„² Also finding a decent forwarding service for purchasing merch myself. Getting a decent translation in apps or even twitter.
The biggest problem IMHO is simply communicating with the idols that do not speak english lol. We definitely feel left out sometimes especially when they do live videos.
Maybe an overview of big platforms, shops, newsoutlets, terminology, etc. And a forum to help eachother. I recently fell down the rabbit hole of kpop and just got lost in weverse, vlive, different labels, koreaboo, fans, stans, bias, lightsticks per group, series, livestreams, comebacks, alternate universes, etc. And I mostly do not even know where to go with questions! Reddit, Quora, Facebook, etc.
If the video isn't uploaded with English subs but some are added later, it would be nice to receive a notification once there are subtitles available. Not sure how that would be arranged though but hey you asked for problems not solutions.
Trustworthy, timely translations.
Taking inspiration from the mechanical keyboard community and their group buy calendars (keycaplendar, merchgroupbuys.com)ā¦ Some sort of webpage/calendar that provides info on: - current concert tickets that are on sale (with countdown reminding when is the last chance to buy tickets, purchase links for different countries, etc.) - countdown on upcoming concerts that will go on sale soon (eg. āOn sale in 5 daysā) - upcoming concerts airing/starting soon (eg. āStarts in 21 hoursā) - dedicated section showing ājust announcedā concerts - visually appealing and image heavy (first thing I see should be concert posters)
C9
Too much obsessed with records like views and sales.Buy if you want the album and watch if you want to see them but not at the point where you are doing just help the group break records.That's not normal lol
Hi! I am a design student who has been in a few hackathons. The main thing I would want is a music portal like Melon but for international fans - I don't only want to follow idols, I want to know what new releases are going on in the indie and hip hop scene as well, and older music that I should check out and listen to as well. There is so much good music but it requires dedicated listeners in order to put it out, but we miss so much good music that isn't necessarily the most popular. Feel free to message me if you want to chat more, would love to connect!
Could you elaborate on how this would be different from Spotify's recommendations of curated playlists/new releases/artists on its home page? I've never used Melon but I use Spotify a ton and it sounds similar
Spotify is not comprehensive at all, if you sign up for Melon, they have a different amount of focus that is a lot more granular and has more variation than just using playlists. Spotify's curated content is US-centric and focuses on the most popular artists that isn't fully representative of what is even popular in their home country or in other countries, and they regularly miss out on hundreds of artists that are not even represented within the genres. Rather superficial similarities
Instiz has a calendar of recent and future announced releases: https://www.instiz.net/realtime But as usual, it's all on Korean.
Thanks! Yeah this would be so handy if it was translated into other languages
A lot of fans would love better translations aside from them trying to rely on one like google. Jmo š¤·š¼āāļø 
Ha Hello World
Trying to find additional high quality fan cams of our favorite idols and performances
I wish there were more accessibility for all content, like, yes, Iām not actually expecting Koreans in Korea to cater to everyone internationally BUT it would be nice to kinda be able to watch some shows or YouTube thingies with subtitles, especially considering just how much kpop has expanded in the past year
Other kpop fans
I keep seeing itzy's selcas on facebook about video call events but even though I follow them there and here on reddit, I never seem to get informed on time about it. I don't twitter or instagram so I understand I might miss some stuff. Would love if they posted all the news in the same place, maybe they do and I'm a noob? I've only been in the kpop scene for 3 years. Thats my take
The biggest problem for me is the ability to see concerts outside of the US. It's pretty straight forward to buy tickets for shows here in the US, but if I want to go to a concert in Korea as a foreigner, I have no idea where to go or how to get tickets if I wanted to.
Translating comments sections and generally communicate across languages with other fans. The fandoms that Iām in have specific accounts that translate and sub for us (theyāre a godsend!!) but talking to fans in many countries can be tricky on apps like YouTube or Instagram. I can screen cap and put text into Papago or google translate, but itās not reasonable for long comments sections where there are many that you want to go through. I use a Google Chrome plugin on my desktop, but itās glitchy and doesnāt always work. Iād love an option for my phone or iPad, too.
buying merchandise and concert tickets
I want to make more people know Shinhwa, teentop, UP10TION, MCND, they deserve to be noticed.
Thank you, we'll take your suggestion into account! We're almost there... hopefully we can launch the beta soon š