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edmtranslations · 8 years ago

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BLING Magazine - Justice Interview [Documentation]

Yes, this is relevant.

First of all, the actual creation process. What I like the most about this is that the text had its own background.

Post-cleanup preview. The three dark boxes at the left-hand side, followed by a little bit below the main heading, is where all text in this interview goes. (There’s the photographer credits at the right, too, I suppose.) And because of that, there actually wasn’t much to document in the first place. It was literally erase the text, paste new text on top, and hey presto - you have an interview translated at the ready!

I will say that picking the right colour for the text here was a bummer. I’m usually quite good at selecting colours by eye, but I had to resort to an image colour picker for this one. Not to mention that the translation there turned out a lot longer than the original text, by almost twice the length. That was bizarre, because this was not the case with the main text.

The yellow text here was easy to pick out by eye, though. And it had to be lighter than the heading. Took some trial and error to figure out the correct colour distribution in the interview.

And that’s what I mean by the interview length - the red highlight is roughly how much of the second ‘box’ was left over by the time I was done. I can’t transfer a bit of the next section there because there’s not enough room, and because it just moves the problem to the next box over. Thankfully this box blends into the background enough that I don’t think this is too big a problem, but it always makes me wary about my textual and font face/size choices whenever this happens.

And the preview of the final piece!

But all of that isn’t actually the point of this documentation post. The BLING Magazine interview contains some references that are only obvious if you know quite a bit about Korea, or even the Korean Justice fandom. I’ll explain.

I guess the food is the simplest thing to go over. I think a lot of people know about kimchi, but yeah, basically: fermented spicy cabbage. Can be eaten as it is, or be used as an ingredient in stew. It’s a core Korean food and not the easiest texture/taste to get used to, so I’m honestly surprised they liked it.

The next thing is a little more cryptic. The original text quotes ‘Korean barbecue’, which I’ve kept in the in the translation, about halfway through, and I can think of two foods that that could correspond to. The first is samgyeopsal (삼겹살). Take a look.

[ Image source: (x) ]

What usually gets made into bacon around those parts is grilled without seasoning or marinade in Korea and eaten straight off the grill, usually accompanied with lettuce leaves, rice, chili paste, and such. The Korean text goes straight for this interpretation, but me, I’m not so sure - I don’t get the impression that samgyeopsal is particularly heavy, or even that interesting in flavour, though I don’t doubt that they must have eaten it. It’s that common of a food in Korea. I will never know the backstory for what they said and how the magazine determined that it was samgyeopsal - if it turns out Justice actually meant that, well, boo to me - but I wonder if they might not have meant something closer to tteok bulgogi (떡불고기), which is what they’re shown to be eating in the title image. Look and compare:

[ Image source: (x) ]

These white things (tteok) are rice cakes, which are also in the title image, and bulgogi does often come on a grill as well. It is a food that certainly fits the definition of a barbecue, as much as samgyeopsal does, is the thing - and I would consider it a heavier, more spicy food than the latter by spades. I’ll never know the truth, but there are my suggestions. And makguli/makgeoli is just rice wine. It’s milky coloured, and goes very well with meat dishes in general, and sometimes you use it in ancestral rites. Again, I’m pretty happy that they like it. A bit of an acquired taste, that.

Now for the ‘military jacket’ thing. I actually devoted an entire post to this when I was posting in my older blog so that the reference could be explained, but it needs reiterating in more detailed terms. That military jacket isn’t a real military jacket in the fashion most people might be thinking of, but is closer to army underwear. It looks like this.

It’s like a snowsuit or a light parkha that you wear when the weather gets cold and it gives you some extra padding. There’s a bottom, too. It’s called 깔깔이 (’kkalkkari’). Now why this got given to Justice in the first place has to do with a sect of the Korean Justice fandom. There’s a Korean site called DCInside, somewhat like reddit and somewhat like 4chan (in that there are subsections of the site devoted to various things, just that DCInside calls them ‘galleries’), and the ‘Electronica Gallery’ there follows the work of EDM artists everywhere. Think of it as like... r/EDM or something. A braver man than most of us got to meet Justice in person via a lottery-determined fan meeting when they came to South Korea for Global Gathering 2010 (mentioned also in the translation), and they were a poster in this gallery. (Apparently he even went to meet them at the airport, which shows his dedication.) During the meeting, they uh... handed them this.

Apparently called it ‘Korean army underwear’ too, when he was handing it over. There are no words. The text written on that kkalkkari is:

일갤 (’ElGal’ - short for ‘Electronic Gallery’) 라드 (’Rad’ - the fan’s DCI username) 젖티너무조아 (’I rly luv Justice’)

I can’t believe I’m writing this out in full. This is super immature language

I honestly don’t know if what happened next was the poster’s intention, or if the text was explained to Justice at all. If someone gave me clothing in a language I can’t read, I’d sure want to know what it says first so that I’m not offending anybody. But what we do know is that Justice then proceeded to make history in Korean Justice fandom by actually wearing the army underwear onstage.

Again, I don’t know why this had to be on army underwear specifically. But yeah. That was a thing that happened. Justice continues to be very popular in Korea and them wearing the kkalkkari became pretty memetic for a good long while, it really caused a stir. I really hope that Justice remember this incident as fondly as we do, for sure!

And that’s the end of the post. I hope you all enjoyed the interview and documentation - future interviews where things need to be explained via a translator’s note or several will do so via the documentation post. it won’t always be the adventures of me messing around with Illustrator layouts. It was great fun working on this!

Disclaimer: The original text of this interview, given by Justice and printed in BLING Magazine in 2012, is not copyrighted by this blog nor by the author of this post. Therefore, the original Korean text will not be distributed here. The author claims ownership of the wording of this translation, which does not deny nor seek to possess the existence of other translations. This translation may be subject to changes in the future. Images with defined copyright have been linked to the source.

#documentation #justice (band)#interview translations #luminatranslations #edmtranslations #bling magazine

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