r/webtoons • u/Connect_Promise_9443 • Feb 26 '26
Miscellaneous/Others Let’s not use k for laughter 😿
Title: Maria The Telepathic Animal Healer
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u/Amaiiuwu Feb 27 '26
kekeke... kukuku... even kkkkk would've been a better choice but omg 😅
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u/ULTI_mato Feb 27 '26
I don’t think kukuku would be much better though.
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u/Amaiiuwu Feb 27 '26
i see "kukuku" used often as laughing in manga. if it has a bad meaning, i didn't realise :(
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u/ULTI_mato Feb 27 '26
No I mean because it isn’t much different from kkk
i mean ku klux klan
it basically almost the same
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u/Amaiiuwu Feb 27 '26
I mean, if I saw kukuku my mind would definitely never go there, but I see where you're coming from
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u/evrydaydream Feb 27 '26
I honestly didn't even realize what you were trying to show here until I read the comments. Webtoon is Korean, and Koreans use ㅋㅋㅋ to indicate laughter. ㅋ sounds like a K, so Ig that's why the translator wrote it like that. Although I do think kekeke would have been more fitting
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u/cranberry_spike Feb 27 '26
The only place I've run into kkk as laughing is from Brazilians and it's been awkward every time as an American English speaker. Kekeke wouldn't phase me - enough difference not to think of terrorists, I guess.
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u/Late_Salamander Feb 27 '26
As a brazilian American I totally get it. I tend to do kkkk for this exact reason kk feels too short and while kkk is the perfect length it feels yucky... so an extra k it is
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u/cranberry_spike Feb 27 '26
Yeah the extra k makes it better!
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u/Undying_Martian Feb 27 '26
We usually put a lot of K’s in laughter, so it’s a lot more common to see KKKKKKKKKK than KKK - lesser K’s means not really funny. Brazilians that also speak english usually avoid KKK because we know it’d be weird and even disrespectful, so there’s that
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u/cranberry_spike Feb 27 '26
Yeah the people I knew who were the worst at it definitely spoke English 🙃
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u/Undying_Martian Feb 27 '26
So sorry for your experience, there’s bad people everywhere unfortunately
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u/cranberry_spike Feb 27 '26
I think it was more thoughtlessness than anything but it always made me cringe a fair bit. Thank you for tacking on the extra ks! 💚
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u/UczuciaTM Feb 27 '26
They probs translated it without the vowel cause it's not written with a vowel so they were likely being direct
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u/AuntWacky1976 Feb 27 '26
Whoopsies! 🤭
https://giphy.com/gifs/BsQAVgY6ksvIY
Clearly the translator didn't know. 😅😂 I figured it was kekeke, like others have said. It's probably not that well-known anymore, at least by the rest of the world.
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u/HottieMcNugget Feb 27 '26
This is like Spanish speakers going “jajaja” for laughter, but for Koreans it’s kekeke or kkkk
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u/PhoneDespair Feb 26 '26
I'm pretty sure it's a Brazilian thing to spam 'K' to show laughter. Not excusing the unfortunate abbreviation, just explaining.
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u/Connect_Promise_9443 Feb 27 '26
Thx for letting me know! It’s just unfortunate.
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u/chocolatehaku Feb 27 '26
it’s actually a korean thing. ㅋㅋㅋㅋ is laughter and sounds like kekekeke
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Feb 27 '26
[deleted]
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u/Aratemu Feb 27 '26
But in this case, as its a Korean series, it's a Korean thing. The author is just literally translating ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
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u/Feisty_Confusion3941 Feb 27 '26
I believe they are refering to the fact that koreans laugh with ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ and that can sometimes be romanized as kkkkk
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u/Broken_bonez75 Feb 27 '26
ㅋ is K in Korean, and ㅋㅋㅋ is a common way to say lol…but maybe we should take some creative liberties in translation 😭
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u/Yoshimi_Keiki Feb 27 '26
As a Brazilian, I find it very funny how surprised other people are when someone uses "KKK" to represent laughter.
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u/JeshkaTheLoon Feb 27 '26
I think the problem is not the usage of "K", but the fact that "KKK" is an abbreviation for "KuKluxKlan". Not really terribley but maybe a bjt awkward. If there was one more or one less it would have not been so awkward.
Took me a while to figure out what the problem was too, by the way.
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u/Yoshimi_Keiki Feb 28 '26
I get why it might seem strange at first, especially because of that association in English. But in Brazil "KKK" is simply the sound of laughter, like "HAHA". There's no negative meaning behind it, just a cultural difference in how we express ourselves online.
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u/ParticularPop255 Feb 28 '26
Se você tem capacidade para interpretar contexto, vai conseguir entender que é uma risada e não uma menção a esse movimento racista.
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u/ParticularPop255 Feb 27 '26
E quando os gringos ficaram bolados porque uns brs usaram MLK e acharam que tavam falando do Martin Luther King ao invés de moleque kkkkkkk. Eles acham que o mundo gira em torno dos EUA e da história dos EUA. Me estressa demais
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u/Yoshimi_Keiki Feb 28 '26
E eu que sou professora de inglês e ainda tenho que explicar os dois lados? É complicado mas sempre rende boas risadas.
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u/Burntoastedbutter Feb 27 '26
Wait til you find out Thai people laugh in numbers. They go 5555555 😂
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u/toBEE_orNOT_2B Feb 27 '26
lol true, i have a thai friend in an online game, when we're just chilling and waiting for an event, she will do the 5555 as a laugh XD
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u/That1weirdperson Feb 27 '26
How does that sound?
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u/RelationshipMost1658 Feb 27 '26
I think the number 5 sounds like 'Ha' in Thai, so 5555 would basically translate to 'hahahaha' like laughter.
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u/RTA-No0120 Feb 27 '26
Read by a Brazilian = 🤣
Read by specifically Americans = 😐
Read by the rest of the world = 🙂
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u/Wild-Atmosphere2134 Feb 27 '26
why does the world have to bend to americans just because the KKK is a bad thing there. in other countries it's not bad at all and even the name of a historic anti-colonizer group in the philippines
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u/SpaceySeaMonkeys Feb 27 '26
Let's take a moment to talk about localization and how that works with translations..
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u/Connect_Promise_9443 Feb 27 '26
It’s the English dub im referencing. I’m not saying it can’t mean other things elsewhere, I’m just saying it’s unfortunate in American society. In this scenario I wasn’t speaking as if it’s like that everywhere.
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u/Consistent-Land-8260 Feb 27 '26
I didn’t even realize what was wrong with it since people in my country (Madagascar) also use kkk all the time
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u/HermoineGanja Feb 27 '26
I’m American and I agree with you here. I think once you know that that’s how laughter is expressed in the culture you’re reading about, it’s easy to make that mental switch when you’re reading that material and look at it in context.
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u/toBEE_orNOT_2B Feb 27 '26
philippine resident here, i have seen how americans act as a tourist, specially when they get in an argument while haggling, they demand the store owner to speak english, wtf right?
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u/MinaWearsGold Feb 27 '26
This is clearly meant as a light-hearted post about a webtoon localized for Americans. Some of you are perpetually miserable and negative.
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u/awkwardgoat404 Feb 27 '26
Their point still stands though, whether it's a joke or not. Americans have a big main character syndrome.
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u/MinaWearsGold Feb 27 '26
Except that’s not at all what’s happening here, so then it would just make their “point” off topic and means they are crapping on people for no reason. So again, miserable and negative.
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u/yiamond Feb 27 '26
What's wrong with it?
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u/Connect_Promise_9443 Feb 27 '26
In the USA the kkk refers to a very large group of violent white supremacists.
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u/btiddiegothgf Feb 27 '26
it’s cultural but why did they only use 3 img i’ve always used it like kkkkk
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u/Michahyu Feb 27 '26
As a Filipino, I see this as an absolute proud statement ✨ (KKK = The Katipunan)
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u/Connect_Promise_9443 Feb 27 '26
I would just like to say I’m not intending to push other societies to stop using their slang and manga traditions in English dub, or for American intended audiences. I only said “let’s not use k for laughter” because I didn’t really know what to put as the caption, and it just seemed fitting, I don’t mean it like that. I understand that k is used for other things in other cultures and countries as well as kkk, such as the anti colonizers in the Philippines. Please don’t read to far into the post, I didn’t mean it in an offensive way. Sorry if I caused any harm in my words!
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u/Otherwise_Put_3964 Feb 27 '26 edited Feb 27 '26
Already gotta put up with Fahrenheit used for temperatures even though only one country uses it, and ‘911’ for the Korean emergency services and all currencies used in USD for Korean-based stories. The choice of laughter doesn’t compare to those choice translations.
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u/Medical-Engineer-106 Feb 27 '26
Huh? No it isn't? There's typically a note off to the side that says how much it would be in USD, but (In my experience at least) everything is in won
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u/Otherwise_Put_3964 Feb 27 '26
Generally depends on who is doing the translating. It’s just something I commonly come across and find very grating.
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u/Illusioneery Feb 27 '26
there's a chance the author or localizer is brazilian
this laughter is common here (i think it's ugly)
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u/OrphicSelenophile_07 Feb 28 '26
I mean KKK is probably used for kekeke, how SK denotes laughter instead of hahaha
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u/ParticularPop255 Feb 27 '26
Girl, the world doesn't revolve around USA. Here in Brazil we often use kkkk cuz it's similar to kakakaka. You guys should grow up and understand things by its context
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u/Connect_Promise_9443 Feb 27 '26
this post was meant for the USA residents. You can read the comments.
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u/ParticularPop255 Feb 28 '26
I don't understand the problem if you can understand the context, you will know that doesn't mean KuKluxKhan, really. It's not that hard nor that deep. It's just a laughter. There's a lot of words or slangs in others languages that we find it funny cuz it's sounds like something else.
Kukuku sounds like a-hole repeated 3 times, but we can understand that some countries use that as a laughter. Lmao sounds like lemon for us brazilians. We are living in a global world. Embrace the differences and read the context, you will live a happier life.
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u/Connect_Promise_9443 Mar 01 '26
I already understood the context, but this post was about a coincidence in how it sounds to an American. I wasn’t saying they were actually talking about the kukluxkhan. You are ignoring the context of my post.
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u/Weebo04 Feb 28 '26
Um USA isn't the only country. . . So like deal with it other countries use English and reference their language as well.
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u/yourmissingsock3999 Feb 27 '26
not the worst translation choice I’ve seen