Stray Kids fandom terms in Korean: STAY, SKZ, Nachimbong

STAY is Stray Kids' official fandom name, written 스테이 in Hangul: a place where people who are straying can stay. We translate fan messages into Korean all day, in 28 languages, and it was one of the two terms this week our pipeline got wrong out of the box. Typed in capitals, STAY came back as STAY: twelve runs, twelve times roman letters sitting in the middle of an otherwise Korean sentence. Our handwriting grid is Hangul-only, so those four letters drop out of the card entirely and the fandom name never arrives.

Pinning it was less obvious than it sounds, because stay is also an ordinary English word. "Please stay healthy" has to stay 건강하세요, not turn into the fandom. So the rule keys on the capitals for the fandom name and then says in as many words that lower-case stay is always the ordinary verb, with the slogan itself written in as an example. We tested that verb twenty-eight times — lower case, and shouted all-caps too, STAY STRONG and STAY SAFE and PLEASE STAY HEALTHY — and it never once became 스테이. The fandom name now comes through as 스테이 every run. Every line below is short enough to finish by hand.

스키즈 is the short form Korean fans use for Stray Kids, and 쓰리라차 is 3RACHA — the producing unit of Bang Chan, Changbin and Han. Both survive translation, but not in the form a fan typed them. Feed our pipeline "SKZ" and it answers 스트레이키즈: the full name, correct and a little louder than the abbreviation you actually wrote. We left that one alone. It is not an error, and the alternative is a rule, and rules have a cost we will come back to in a moment.

3RACHA comes back as 3RACHA, in roman letters, and that one is on purpose. Our translator carries a short list of artist tokens that stay in Latin — BTS, TXT, 3RACHA — because they are read that way worldwide. On a screen that is fine. On a Hangul handwriting grid it is not, because roman letters are exactly what the grid cannot accept. So the line below uses 쓰리라차, which is what Korean outlets write, and what your hand can actually finish.

나침봉 — 나침반, compass, plus 봉, stick — named for the red compass sitting in the middle of it. It is a fan nickname rather than an official product name, and it is the one term this week that already came back right. Our pipeline returned 나침봉 on both runs, written solid and written with a space, which genuinely surprised us: two weeks earlier the SEVENTEEN light stick had come back as 카럿 뿅봉 and 아미밤, other groups' light sticks entirely. The difference seems to be that 나침봉 is not a pure sounding-out. 나침반 is a real Korean word, so there is something underneath for the translation to land on, and it lands. The only blemish was a stray space of its own, 나침 봉, on one of the two spaced runs.

스키주 — SKZ plus ZOO, the members drawn as characters — went the other way, and it is the honest failure of this week. Our translator erased the brand and returned 스트레이키즈 인형, "Stray Kids plushie": accurate, and with the name gone. Lower-cased it wobbled instead, into 스키즈루 and 스키즈주. We wrote a rule to pin it, and the rule spread. SKZ CODE started coming back as 스키주 코드, SKZ-TALKER as 스키주 토커. We fenced it off four times; the last attempt listed the wrong outputs as forbidden and made them more likely, not less. So we removed the rule. 스키주 is still the word to write by hand — our translator just will not hand it to you yet.