Can This Love Be Translated? Review: When Pain Speaks Another Language

Can This Love Be Translated? starts with a simple premise: a celebrity and her interpreter travel through three countries and work together, leading to a romance that was initially sparked by the actress.

Available on Netflix, the show was created and written by Hong Jung-eun, Hong Mi-ran, and Yoo Young-eun, and directed by Yoo Young-eun. The main cast features names well-known to K-drama fans, such as Kim Seon-ho (playing Joo Ho-jin) and the charismatic Go Youn-jung (playing Cha Mu-hee).

The protagonist, Joo Ho-jin, is a multilingual interpreter known for his rigid ethics. He translates the world with precision because he believes emotions are inherently unstable. During a business trip to Japan, he meets Cha Mu-hee, an actress who becomes an overnight phenomenon.

The encounter begins away from home in Japan, grows during their stay in Canada, and strengthens at the end of the trip in Italy. Throughout this journey, the show follows a typical K-drama melodrama path where Mu-hee carries a traumatic past. This trauma manifests as a kind of shadow that, at certain moments, says what she cannot say while awake. The romance, then, is not just about them liking each other; it is about them learning to understand each other’s emotional language.

The show’s greatest strength lies in its emotional translation, and when the series leans into that, it excels. Ho-jin is the reserved type but not cold, as his behavior is a defense mechanism to avoid getting hurt. Mu-hee, meanwhile, fluctuates between gentleness, impulsivity, and duality. This constant shift keeps the central question alive: is loving about understanding, or is it just about accepting that we only comprehend things in parts?

Like a narrative within a narrative, the show Romantic Journey, which Mu-hee stars in, helps maintain a funny, beautiful, and cozy pace for the series. This also allows the story to shift away from the usual Korean setting.

However, it is not all perfect. Some critical reception points out that the series occasionally suffers from uneven pacing and narrative decisions that undermine the message intended for the audience.

Even so, the overall result is a well-executed, classic K-drama romance.

In Can This Love Be Translated?, Mu-hee isn’t mysterious just to make the script more charming. The goal here is to make us wonder: what happens when the mind needs to survive something terrible too early in life and cannot find a language to translate or expose its pain? In this way, the series suggests that instead of storing the experience as a bad memory, the brain may resort to an emergency mechanism known as dissociation.

In simpler terms, dissociation is an involuntary detachment where a person may feel distant from their own body, the reality around them, memories, emotions, or even themselves. The NHS describes dissociative disorders as conditions that occur after traumatic events, and these can be transient or long-lasting cases.

Fiction often dramatizes this as highly visible, cinematic switches, and Mu-hee dramatizes dissociation with a K-drama aesthetic involving back and forth shifts or an other self that takes over. But the most interesting reading is not that she has a specific disorder. Rather, it is that trauma can crack one’s internal experience, and the mind can invent ingenious ways to keep existing.

Female Trauma

There is also something deeply symbolic about the fact that Can This Love Be Translated? chooses to represent female trauma as a splitting of the self.

Since the 19th century, Western culture has associated female trauma with hysteria, fragmentation, and duplicity. What changes here is the use of an elegant metaphor and the invitation for the viewer to read this fragmentation less as a monstrous pathology and more as a survival strategy. This factor alone sets the show apart.

This is because pop culture has a complicated history with dissociation and multiple identities. Often, these portrayals slide into sensationalism and caricature, where the other self emerges as a villain, a threat, or an eccentric and almost demonic entity. Can This Love Be Translated? does flirt with this imagery, especially when Do Ra-mi takes control abruptly, but it doesn’t dive fully into that trope.

Do Ra-mi is not evil; she is dysregulated. She is not an enemy, but a displaced psychic echo. Culturally, this is important because it transforms the narrative into one of integration rather than exclusion. The question is not how to eliminate Do Ra-mi, but why she needed to exist in the first place.

Still, the series is not without its slips. By stylizing dissociation with a specific aesthetic, dramatic timing, and clear narrative function, it risks oversimplifying a deeply complex phenomenon. In real life, dissociation is rarely so legible, as internal chaos is usually more mundane and discreet.

Let’s also talk about the important subtext here: Mu-hee is a public figure. As a celebrity and an icon, the world demands consistency, performance, and stability from her. Dissociation, then, emerges as a response to historical pressure on traumatized women to suffer without affecting or bothering anyone around them.

In this sense, Do Ra-mi is almost a modern version of the Freudian hysterical woman. The crucial difference is that the series doesn’t treat this division as a weakness, but as a psychic cost. The body and mind pay the price when trauma finds no social space to exist and, therefore, to heal.

The metaphor of translation gains symbolic strength. Mu-hee cannot translate her traumatic experience into the real world or to other people. Thus, Do Ra-mi emerges as an imperfect interpretation. Yet, she still communicates something essential: the pain is here.

Another win for the series is avoiding the cliché of love being a cure-all. The relationship with Ho-jin doesn’t cure Mu-hee. Instead, it exposes the dissociation. This is a mature choice, as affection does not resolve trauma; it simply makes it impossible to ignore any longer.

Here, love stops being a magical solution and becomes an emotional confrontation.

Can This Love Be Translated? moves forward in terms of empathy, but it still simplifies the phenomenon it tries to portray. It translates the idea of fragmentation as a mental defense well, but it portrays the actual processes of the phenomenon poorly.

Nevertheless, its value lies in removing dissociation from the realm of the monstrous and placing it in the human sphere. In an industry that still depicts trauma as an individual failure or a narrative spectacle, this is already a major step forward.

In the end, the series seems to say that the fragmented self needs to be heard and understood.

Yes, it is, because besides being aesthetically beautiful, the series manages to be lighthearted despite the complex theme.

We find ourselves rooting for Mu-hee not just so she can heal from her pain, but because despite all her trauma, she hasn't stopped smiling and trying to be someone full of love. Mu-hee, with all her duality and complexity, is a captivating character!

While Ho-jin can sometimes be irritating due to his blunt way of handling Mu-hee’s love, it won’t ruin your experience. It might just make you root for the second lead, as was my case.

Oh, and a shout-out to Mu-hee’s manager and friend, who avoided the toxic best friend trope. He is not the typical character who belatedly realizes he is in love with his best friend and interferes with her relationship.

So, are you thinking about binge-watching Can This Love Be Translated? and learning to interpret Mu-hee’s language?

Rating: 3.9 out of 5