Why the swearing gets cleaned up in subtitles
Korean grades profanity finely and English does not. Faced with a rung that has no English equivalent, subtitlers round down — and characterisation goes with it.
Subtitle Notes
Why official subtitles translate the way they do, what they choose to drop, and the constraints translators work under.
Two lines, forty characters: the rules subtitlers actually work under
Most of what gets lost between Korean and an English subtitle is lost to arithmetic: two lines, about forty characters each, read at the speed an audience can manage while watching.
The Korean words subtitles always delete (and why translators do it)
좀, 그냥, 막, -네, -잖아. None of them carry facts, all of them carry tone, and a subtitle rationed by the character cuts them first. That is why subtitled Korean sounds curter than it is.
“Ani” (아니) — the word that usually is not “no”
Subtitles print “No—” and then the speaker agrees with everything. The bare 아니 at the front of a sentence is closer to “wait” or “hang on”, and it denies nothing.