SEVENTEEN fandom terms in Korean: CARAT, BooSeokSoon, Caratbong

CARAT is SEVENTEEN's official fandom name, written 캐럿 in Hangul. It is the diamond weight unit — the more carats, the more the gem is worth — and S.COUPS announced it at an encore concert in February 2016. We translate fan messages into Korean all day, in 28 languages, and 캐럿 is one of the terms our pipeline already gets right: we typed "I'm a CARAT" and "we carats", and all four runs came back as 캐럿, singular and plural alike. 캐럿 랜드, the fanmeeting brand SEVENTEEN has run since 2017, survives the trip too.

One term did not. GOING SEVENTEEN is the group's self-produced variety show, and both times we tested it the title simply vanished — the translation came back about 세븐틴, the group, with the show erased. That is a particular kind of failure: the thing the fan actually wrote about disappears, and nothing on the card marks the loss. We pinned the title to 고잉 세븐틴, and it has held on every run since. Every line below is short enough to finish by hand.

부석순 (BooSeokSoon) is SEVENTEEN's three-member special unit — Seungkwan, DK and Hoshi — and the name takes one syllable from each of their birth names: 부 from 부승관, 석 from 이석민, 순 from 권순영. It is the same kind of fan-made compound as BLACKPINK's 젠츄리챙, and the spelled-out form gave our pipeline no trouble: type "booseoksoon" and 부석순 comes back. The abbreviation was the problem. "BSS" came through as BSS — three roman letters left untranslated in the middle of an otherwise Korean sentence. On a screen that looks harmless. On our handwriting grid, which is Hangul-only, those letters drop out entirely, so the unit the fan was writing to never reaches the card at all. We pinned BSS to 부석순.

Member names fall into the same trap more quietly. Jun's birth name is 문준휘, and 준휘 is what CARATs write — but both times we tested it, the translator spelled 준희 instead, a far more common Korean name that is not his. One vowel, a different person. That one is pinned now too, and the last line below carries it.

The official light stick is 캐럿봉 — 캐럿 plus 봉, "stick" — released in February 2017 for the group's first fanmeeting. Written solid, "caratbong", our pipeline handled it. Written with a space, "carat bong", it produced something we had not expected: once 카럿 뿅봉, once 아미밤. Both of those are other fandoms' light sticks. 뿅봉 belongs to BLACKPINK, 아미밤 to BTS, and they were sitting there because we had put them there ourselves over the two weeks before. Each fandom word we pin makes the earlier ones a little greedier, and a light-stick-shaped input got pulled toward whichever light stick the pipeline had learned most recently. The fix was not a better spelling. We wrote down that a light stick name belongs to exactly one group and can never stand in for another, and 캐럿봉 has come back clean on every run since.

The last two lines are encore lines. 아주 나이스 is the chant behind SEVENTEEN's never-ending encore, and it broke in a way worth describing: "nice" evaporated and only the adverb survived, leaving 아주, — "very," — with nothing after it, and the sentence fell over. The official styling is 아주 NICE, but roman letters never reach the Hangul handwriting grid, so 아주 나이스 is the only form you can actually write out by hand.