What has occupied much of my brain space over the last few weeks is Christmas music. Or more specifically, Korean versions of English Christmas songs. Translating Korean Christmas songs back to English (which themselves had first been translated from English to Korean) is both hilarious and insightful. For instance, "Santa Claus is coming to town" translated from Korean back to English becomes: "Santa Grandfather is coming to our village" (relative position matters a lot here in Korea; KFC's Colonel Sanders, for instance, is "KFC Grandfather"). The first two lines are: "If you cry, it's not okay. If you cry, it's not okay -- you won't get a present if you cry" -- harsh!!
Another favorite is Rudolph (pronounced "Rudolpuh" -- as you can't end a word with a consonant in Korean). The last line of the first verse talks about the tough life that Rudolph has -- in America, it's around not being able to participate in games; in Korea, the line is: "Poor Rudolph became an outsider" (which is a really bad thing here in Korean society!)
All of this practice is for our performance at the Samsung Korean speech competition today, which precedes the GSG Holiday Party. The spouses are performing as entertainment! At first, I had this vision of us rockin' it K-Pop style, kindda like this video of K-Pop stars singing Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer:
But alas, even after weeks of rehearsal, we are much less K-Pop glam, and much more like children in kindergarten... complete with our teacher standing in front of us and mouthing the words to us. Our Jingle Bells sounds more like this (albeit, we sing much slower than this version):
Rounding out our Christmas medley, we have Santa Claus is coming to town, and a Korean children's winter song that translates into:
My hands are cold, my feet are cold because of the winter wind...
I really really hate the winter wind.
As if on cue, it's now time to head over to Samsung for our dress rehearsal! Here goes nothing!!
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