TWICE fandom terms in Korean: ONCE, Candybong, 2yeon

ONCE is TWICE's official fandom name, written 원스 in Hangul, and the idea behind it is simple: love TWICE once, and they will return it twice over. We translate fan messages into Korean every day, in 28 languages, and on two of our test sentences, before we touched anything, our pipeline got this name right zero times out of sixteen runs. Six of those runs came back as 스테이, which is Stray Kids' fandom, not TWICE's. That one was our own doing. The STAY rule we added a month earlier carries an example sentence, "STAY will always be by your side." Hand the translator "ONCE will always be by your side, TWICE", the same sentence with another fandom in it, and it copied the example wholesale. In a few runs it even turned the sentence around, so that TWICE was the one standing beside STAY. Most of the other runs left ONCE in roman letters, and our handwriting grid is Hangul-only, so those four letters drop out and leave a bare particle where the fandom name should be: 트와이스 가 정말 자랑스러워해요.

The fix had a trap in it, because once is one of the most common words in English. "I saw you once in Seoul" has to stay 한 번, not become the fandom. So we tested the ordinary word next to the name: lower case, and shouted in capitals too, I WANT TO SEE YOU AT LEAST ONCE IN MY LIFE and COME TO CHILE ONCE AGAIN PLEASE. It never became 원스. Our favorite test was "I saw TWICE twice this year", the group and the adverb in one sentence, and it came back 트와이스를 두 번 every time. In every test run after the fix, the fandom name arrived as 원스, including in a sentence our rule never shows as an example: "happy anniversary from all the ONCE in Mexico".

캔디봉, Candybong: TWICE's official light stick, named after Candy Boy, a track on their first mini album. Typed in capitals, CANDYBONG came back right both times we tried it before the fix. Typed in lower case, candybong or candy bong, it came back as 뿅봉 four times out of four, and 뿅봉 is BLACKPINK's light stick.

We have watched this happen before. SEVENTEEN's 캐럿봉, typed with a space, got pulled toward other groups' light sticks too, while Stray Kids' 나침봉 never did. What separates them seems to be the word in front of 봉. 나침봉 rests on 나침반, a real Korean word for compass, so the translation has somewhere to land. In 캔디봉 and 캐럿봉 that part is an English word, candy or carat, written the way it sounds, so apart from 봉 there is no Korean to hold on to, and a light stick name we pinned earlier is the nearest thing in reach. Three light sticks are far too few to call that a rule, so take it as what we have noticed so far. We tied 캔디봉 to TWICE, and in every test run since it has come back as 캔디봉, joined or spaced.

투연 is Nayeon and Jeongyeon together, with the 2 read as 투, two. Our pipeline kept the digit and returned 2연 both times. On a screen that still reads fine. On our Hangul-only grid the 2 drops out and you are left with a single syllable, 연. Now it returns 투연 every run, capitals included. 미챙 is Mina and Chaeyoung, 챙 being Chaeyoung's nickname, Chaeng. In one of two runs our pipeline spelled it out sound by sound as 미채응; now it is 미챙 every time.

Two names needed nothing from us. MISAMO, the unit of the three Japanese members Mina, Sana and Momo that debuted in 2023, came back as 미사모 in most runs without a rule of its own; a few misses, mostly left in roman letters. 사이다 is Sana and Dahyun. Our own pairing rule would predict 사다, yet the translator already writes 사이다, the name fans use, so we left it alone. TWICE has more pair names than these, but we only wrote the ones at least two Korean fan sources agree on.