Here is a man who can move between Korean, English, Japanese, Italian, French and Chinese without breaking stride, and who can get by in Spanish and German on top of that. Ju Ho-jin lives inside other people’s sentences. Someone speaks, and he is there half a beat behind, turning one language into another, careful, accurate, invisible. Kim Seonho, who plays him, called him “a man of contradictions”: someone who delivers foreign languages fluently and is awkward at expressing his own emotions.
That is the whole drama in miniature, and the title asks it as a question. Can This Love Be Translated? (이 사랑 통역 되나요?, I sarang tongyeok doenayo?) is a twelve-episode Netflix series that premiered on January 16, 2026. The Hong sisters, Hong Jeong-eun and Hong Mi-ran, who also wrote Hotel del Luna and Alchemy of Souls, wrote it, and Yu Yeong-eun directed. The question is meant literally at first. Then it slowly stops being literal.
Spoiler notice: this article discusses key plot points, including the reveal at the end of episode 7. The final ending is not described.
Two People Who Speak Well and Say Nothing
The official pitch gives each lead one sentence. Ju Ho-jin is a multilingual interpreter, fluent in languages but clumsy in the language of love. Cha Mu-hui, played by Go Younjung, is loved by many but clumsy in her own love. Side by side, they are two kinds of silence. He hides behind other people’s words. She is surrounded by an audience and still cannot say the one thing that matters to her.
The Hong sisters have said the story began with imagining a romantic current between an interpreter and a star. They then made the two leads the most direct communicator and the most curved communicator. The pairing is odd and good. An interpreter’s whole job is to say exactly what someone else means, with nothing added. The star goes around things. Go Younjung put it plainly when she described Mu-hui as someone who speaks in circles, while she herself can’t speak in circles and can’t understand it when others do.
The sisters also say the title carries love and communication through the job of the interpreter. That is the useful way in. This is not a story about a foreign-language problem. Language is the room where a different problem gets staged: saying yourself aloud to another person.
The Story, in Order
The story begins in Japan. Ho-jin meets Mu-hui by chance while she is still an unknown actress, and he helps interpret for her. It is a small act of service, the kind an interpreter performs without thinking, and the series treats it as the first knot between them.
Then life moves on without them. Mu-hui falls into crisis after an accident during a film shoot. Yet her film character becomes a hit, and she becomes globally famous. When the story catches up with her, she is a top star, and the easy anonymity of that first meeting is long gone.
Her next step is a global dating show called Romantic Trip, opposite the Japanese actor Hiro (Kurosawa Hiro, played by Fukushi Sota). She asks Ho-jin to come along as her interpreter. The show shoots in Canada and Italy. The dating-show frame suits the drama’s logic. It builds a stage where affection is performed for cameras, while the real feeling grows in the gap between the words she is given and the words he passes on.
Around the two leads sits a small, lived-in circle. Shin Ji-seon (Lee I-dam) is the show’s PD, with a long history with Ho-jin. Kim Yong-u (Choi Woosung) is Mu-hui’s manager. Kim Won-hae plays the writer Kim Yeong-hwan.
How the Story Is Told: Four Countries, Four Moods
Filming ran from June 2024 to early February 2025, across South Korea, Japan, Canada and Italy. Go Younjung and Kim Seonho spent part of that first summer in Japan.
The Hong sisters reportedly chose the countries to add emotional depth, not scenery. Japan was the setting for the characters’ first meeting, to capture excitement. Canada would feature the aurora as a turning point. Italy offered a romantic atmosphere for the climax. Read that way, each place is a register of feeling, and the journey is also a journey from meeting, to rupture, to something like resolution.
Japan, Canada, Italy
The Japanese stretch includes Kamakura. Reported main locations there are Enoshima, Shichirigahama Beach and Gokurakuji Station, with the Enoden tram running along the coast. It is a quiet choice, a seaside town where a tram line and a shoreline do most of the work of mood.
In Canada, the places named in tourism material include Calgary (Heritage Park and the Galaxie Diner), the Badlands, Upper Kananaskis Lake, where the aurora scene was shot, and Canmore’s Quarry Lake. Banff National Park is about an hour and a half by car from Calgary. In Italy, Siena’s Piazza del Campo, in Tuscany, is among the locations.
When Korea Plays Somewhere Else
Not everything that looks foreign was shot abroad. The Onyang Folk Museum in Asan reportedly served as an exhibition hall, and the Pinodia Expo Tower in Sokcho as a Japanese observation tower early in the story. Sanmeoru Farm in Paju is said to stand in for a winery in Italy, and a Goyang café beside a rail line for the Italian restaurant where Ho-jin and Mu-hui, in her Do Ra-mi form, go night after night. Treat these as reported details.
The Aurora
The aurora is the one location a production cannot guarantee. At the press conference Go Younjung said that on the day the aurora scene was shot, on her way home from work, she actually saw an aurora. (“오로라 신 촬영하는 날에 퇴근하는 길에 실제로 오로라를 봤다.”) Director Yu said she saw it once more before the Canadian shoot ended, and that local staff told her seeing it twice is almost a miracle.
There was an ordinary kind of translation going on behind the camera too. At the Next on Netflix 2025 Korea event in early 2025, Yu said that with so many foreign crew there were times they could not communicate, but affection for the work meant the language barrier was not a big problem. She added that since everyone speaks a different “grammar,” you need an open mind to connect, and that the actors were all open-minded.
The Girl Who Steps Out of the Imagination
Full spoilers for the episode 7 twist in this section.
Until the end of episode 7, Do Ra-mi exists only in Cha Mu-hui’s imagination. Then she steps out into the world. Go Younjung plays her too; the official record lists the role as 차무희/도라미.
Go Younjung has said she did not know this was coming. She described the turn as a “fresh shock” and a change of genre, as if the series you thought you were watching had quietly become another one.
What Do Ra-mi is depends on whom you ask. Go Younjung describes her as direct and refreshing, a kind of interpreter between Mu-hui and Ho-jin who says what Mu-hui cannot. That description is a key to the series. Read this way, in a drama about an interpreter, the figure who finally voices the unsayable is herself an interpreter, one the heroine has built from the inside.
The reading is mine, but it rests on the structure. The series spends its first seven episodes setting up a man who translates other people’s words and a woman who cannot say her own. Then it produces a second self: the one voice in the story that is entirely plain. Ho-jin spends those episodes passing along what others want Mu-hui to say, and Do Ra-mi is the first character who says what Mu-hui herself wants.
The ambiguity is real, and some viewers have gone in a more clinical direction. One viewer review reads Do Ra-mi through the idea of dissociative identity. That is a viewer’s reading, not something the production states, and the series itself leans on the fantasy register. Even genre is contested. Netflix and most news outlets call it a romantic comedy. A travel guide calls it a fantasy romance. One business-paper headline calls it a fantasy rom-com. Some viewers call it psychological, or melodrama. Each label catches a different stretch of the series.
The Craft of Two Performances
Kim Seonho: Learning to Sound Like a Translator
Kim Seonho reportedly spent about four months preparing for the role, including Japanese, Italian and English, before filming began. He has described his method: first memorise the lines, then lay emotion on top, with interpreters on set to help.
Two other choices stand out. He set Ho-jin’s voice lower than usual from the start so as not to be swept away when Mu-hui’s and Do Ra-mi’s personalities cross in later episodes. That is a decision about the whole arc, made before the arc was visible. He also chose to deliver the Hong sisters’ literary-style dialogue exactly as written, to honour the writers’ intentions rather than modernise it.
On set he kept asking Go Younjung what emotion his face read as. The detail is charming, and it fits the role. Ho-jin’s face is supposed to give nothing away, and the actor playing him wanted an outside reader to say how much was leaking through.
He has also described Ho-jin’s falling for Mu-hui as a slow stage of resisting it (입덕 부정기), and said the character has a deficiency (결핍) that he finds filled in her. Director Yu said that because Ho-jin is restrained and plain, he needed delicate emotional acting. The performance was built as a slow thaw, not a spark.
Go Younjung: Joy With an Expiry Date
Go Younjung’s own description of Mu-hui may be the most useful single sentence about the role. Because Mu-hui became a top star so suddenly, she feels joy, but also a lingering anxiety that this festival might end at any moment. Play that in any scene and Mu-hui stops being a glossy lead and becomes someone for whom attention feels temporary.
The series asks her to move between that anxious star and the uncontrollable Do Ra-mi. Yu described Mu-hui as more dynamic and action-oriented than Ho-jin, with more purity, lovability and energy. Go Younjung reportedly wore around 100 outfits in the series, which says something about how much of Mu-hui the drama puts on the surface, and how much it keeps underneath.
Casting, Chemistry and the Age Gap
Director Yu has said both leads won their roles because their performance styles matched their characters. Kim Seonho was chosen for his ability to balance Ho-jin’s serious, restrained nature with the Hong sisters’ comedic style and to convey subtle emotional shifts. Go Younjung was cast for a natural, bubbly charm and transparency, and the Hong sisters already trusted her. She had worked with them on Alchemy of Souls, and she has said they told her they trusted her because she had done well before.
Choi Woosung, who plays the manager Kim Yong-u, was recommended by the Hong sisters after My Girlfriend Is a Gumiho. According to one account, he went through a ten-month process, with three meetings with the director and chemistry reads, before he secured the role.
On chemistry, Yu said she had never experienced better than that of Kim Seonho and Go Younjung. She added that the two are easygoing and friendly, which made communication comfortable on set, and that the comfort shows on screen. Go Younjung said she felt closer to Kim Seonho in Canada than in Japan, and closer in Italy than in Canada. The closeness of the characters grew along the same route as the shoot.
Before release there was concern about the roughly ten-year age gap between the leads. One business-paper review credited their visual chemistry and noted that it exceeded expectations. Not everyone agreed, and some viewers found it underwhelming. The evidence here is a split, and it is fairer to leave it split.
What Viewers and Critics Said
The reception was not one thing.
On the positive side, international viewers praised the leads’ chemistry and emotional delivery, with remarks like “The chemistry between Kim Seonho and Go Younjung drives the viewing” and “Language and culture may differ, but emotions are perfectly transmitted.” A viewer-rating site put the series at 7.9, with users praising the chemistry, scenery and cinematography. Viewers commenting on a Netflix behind-the-scenes video wrote things like “눈빛 유죄” (the eyes are guilty). One reviewer, writing about Kim Seonho’s voice, noted clear pronunciation, rich resonance and precise tone control that carries emotional shifts. Another praised Go Younjung’s handling of the anxious star and the uncontrollable Do Ra-mi, including an empty gaze after memory loss that conveys psychological depth.
On the other side, the complaints were consistent. One business-paper review found the premise attractive and the execution disappointing, felt a repeated conflict structure weakened the second half, and disliked the Do Ra-mi device. A newspaper column was sharply negative, said the viewer could not follow, answered the title’s question with “no,” and called the casting risky. Some viewers raised pacing and the shift into psychological material in the middle episodes. Other voices described the narrative as thinning in later episodes, with predictable conflicts and supporting roles that lack depth.
Korean social media was mixed. Viewers liked the visuals and chemistry but questioned pacing and character development. Some stopped after the early episodes, while praise built as the series went on.
The split follows the series’ own seam. The first seven episodes promise one kind of story, the twist at the end of episode 7 changes the terms, and the response divides between people who followed the change and people who felt left behind. This is a drama about whether a message survives translation, and its reception is a small case of the same thing.
The Numbers, and the Trips They Produced
By January 21, the series reportedly ranked third globally on Flix Patrol, with 4 million views in its first days, and stood at number one in 13 countries. Netflix is reported to have counted 400 million viewing hours within four days, with the series at number two in the global Top 10 for non-English television in its first week. In its second week it reportedly reached number one in that category with 900 million viewing hours. These figures come from single reports, so treat them as approximate.
The numbers had a second life as itineraries. Hana Tour reported that search volume and bookings for Japan, Canada and Italy rose after release, helped by Lunar New Year and the winter holidays. Separately, one account says that by February 15, accommodation reservations in the Canadian Rockies, especially Banff and Canmore, had doubled, with visitors seeking out Quarry Lake.
Go Younjung reportedly won Best Character (Actress) and Best OTT Artist at the 2026 Asia Star Entertainer Awards, and Best Popularity Award, Actress and Global Icon at the 2026 Blue Dragon Series Awards. Kim Seonho and the series reportedly drew further nominations, including at the Baeksang Arts Awards, where Yu was named a nominee for Best Director in television. Awards details here rest on a single source.
Return to the Question
The Hong sisters named the end of episode 9 as the scene that struck them most. It carries a line, linked to an Italian opera phrase, that runs roughly: “Please love me, Mr. Ju Ho-jin, as I love you. Goodbye.” It is a request and a farewell in one breath, which is a very exact way to describe how Mu-hui speaks.
Director Yu has said there are as many languages in the world as there are people, and that loving someone means looking into each person’s own language. She also called it an honour to introduce the drama in 190 countries, each in its own language, so the series about translation was itself being translated into dozens of tongues as it played.
Does Can This Love Be Translated? answer its title? One columnist said no. Others said the feeling got through whatever the language. The series itself seems to suggest something in between: that love is not translated so much as learned, one person’s grammar at a time, by someone willing to keep an open mind. An interpreter spends a career passing other people’s meaning across a gap. What Ho-jin has to learn is the harder version, which is to let someone else carry his.
Trailer: Watch the trailer on KMDb
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Source: Basic film information from the Korean Movie Database (KMDb)