From ‘Sorry Sorry’ to ‘That Banana’: the Subtitling of a Korean Music Video as a Site of Contestation in Taiwan

Focusing on contemporary Taiwanese popular culture, this paper delineates how the subtitling of a Korean music video has become a battlefield on which meanings are poached through punning in the process of translation. It contextualises Korean popular culture as one of the dominant genres in Taiwan and introduces ‘Sorry Sorry,’ a chart topper by Super Junior. In the specific social, cultural, political and linguistic context of Taiwan, the intensive commercial promotion of ‘Sorry Sorry’ in mainstream media has led to fans making sense of the lyrics through a hybridising process of wordplay, resulting in a steadily increasing number of online ‘fan videos’ with alternative subtitling. Circulating through online video streaming websites, these fan videos testify to the fans’ talents as what Henry Jenkins terms ‘textual poachers.’ Through this poaching process, in one of the most popular online examples, ‘Sorry Sorry’ is nonsensically mutated into ‘That Banana.’ Calling upon Walter Redfern’s pun theory in tandem with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of minor literature, I examine the linguistic mechanism involved in the mutating process as a springboard to re-articulate theories from anthropology, literary theory and music video studies in the age of the internet. This paper questions the idea of authorship in the age of the internet and points out how the grey area between anthropological definitions of translation and transcription has become an arena for utterance, allowing meanings in fan videos to be poached, negotiated and transformed. Platform 5.1, Transformations