By the end of Can This Love Be Translated?, Mu-hee and Ho-jin are finally speaking the same language. Throughout the series, they struggle to find the words to express their feelings, but they eventually find true love in navigating the uncertainty. Ahead, actors Kim Seon-ho and Go Youn-jung explain how their characters finally clarify their relationship, and decode the series’ dramatic, emotional finale.

What is Can This Love Be Translated? about?

Joo Ho-jin (Kim Seon-ho) is a polyglot interpreter who has built his life around linguistic precision while avoiding emotional vulnerability. Living in his grandfather’s book-filled house, he takes the same trip to Japan every year — ostensibly for work, but really to dwell on his unrequited feelings for Ji-sun (Lee E-dam), who’s now about to marry his half-brother Jin-suk.

Everything shifts when Ho-jin takes on an interpreting job for Romantic Trip, a reality show with an unusual premise: it pairs two actors who share no common language,  one from Korea and one from Japan,  and sends them to romantic destinations around the world to see if love can bloom through real-time translation. On set, he’s reunited with Cha Mu-hee (Go Youn-jung), an actor he met during a chance encounter in Japan months earlier. She takes part in the reality show’s dating experiment, along with Japanese actor Hiro Kurosawa (Sota Fukushi). 

When Mu-hee and Ho-jin first met in Japan, Mu-hee was an unknown actor. But after landing a breakout role as the killer zombie Do Ra-mi in the horror film The Quiet Woman, an on-set accident left her unconscious for six months. She woke to discover she’d become an international sensation, but fame has come at a terrifying price. She often experiences hallucinations in which the character she is playing takes her to a creepy house inside her mind.

As Ho-jin interprets conversations between Mu-hee and Hiro on Romantic Trip, an uncomfortable truth emerges: Mu-hee and Ho-jin are falling for each other. Every romantic line he translates from Hiro to Mu-hee becomes harder to deliver. And thus Can This Love Be Translated’s central tension crystallizes: Ho-jin can flawlessly interpret between Korean, Japanese, English, and Italian, but he and Mu-hee, both native Korean speakers, constantly misunderstand each other. Ho-jin remarks that each person has a language of their own, and Mu-hee’s words are the most difficult language he has ever encountered.

Who is Do Ra-mi, and why does she haunt Mu-hee?

At first, Do Ra-mi, a killer zombie, simply exists as Mu-hee’s character in The Quiet Woman. But after an accident on set, the character becomes a haunting presence: a hallucination who tells Mu-hee that a possible future with Ho-jin is not possible. In the hallucinations, Do Ra-mi  speaks to Mu-hee from her childhood home, where Mu-hee’s parents both died.

“When people have doubt or anxiety or worry and fear in their hearts, they think about the worst situation,” Go Youn-jung tells Tudum. “Mu-hee created this being called Do Ra-mi as a delusion.” It's a psychological shield that emerges whenever Mu-hee feels most exposed — Do Ra-mi voices every catastrophic possibility, every reason why love will fail, and every justification for pushing people away before they can abandon her first.

As the series goes on, however, Do Ra-mi is no longer just a voice inside Mu-hee’s head. She becomes a full-blown alter ego, and takes over Mu-hee’s consciousness. Ho-jin becomes the only one who witnesses this complete takeover, in Italy on the set of Romantic Trip.

Where is the Can This Love Be Translated? location?

The K-drama was shot and is set in countries all around the world, starting in Japan and ending in Italy.

Japan: Ho-jin and Mu-hee meet serendipitously. He helps her confront her ex-boyfriend’s mistress. They lose touch, but Mu-hee keeps a photo of Ho-jin as a memento.

Korea: Now-famous Mu-hee unexpectedly finds that Ho-jin has been hired as her translator for an international interview. However, he reveals he deliberately took the job in order to ask her to delete his photo from her Instagram. They exchange numbers, and Ho-jin takes the job on her new reality show Romantic Trip.

Canada: During filming, the two grow closer and confess their feelings for each other. Just as they’re about to start dating, however, Ho-jin’s first love Ji-sun becomes their show’s producer. When Mu-hee learns Ji-sun broke off her engagement to Ho-jin’s brother before coming to Canada, she assumes Ho-jin still loves Ji-sun and preemptively breaks things off. Ho-jin drops out of the show.

Italy: Mu-hee joins the latter half of filming in Italy. By day, she shoots the show; at night, Do Ra-mi takes over, prowling the city. To understand why Do Ra-mi controls Mu-hee, Ho-jin returns as the show’s translator to see her. By day, he’s a translator, but at night he is Do Ra-mi’s babysitter as he follows her around Italy to make sure Do Ra-mi/Mu-hee doesn’t get in trouble. Do Ra-mi tells him that if Mu-hee is happy, she’ll stop taking over.

What happens to Mu-hee and Ho-jin? Do they end up together?

During the Italy shoot, Mu-hee (when she’s herself) pines for Ho-jin, but can’t make a move — especially since crew members have mentioned he’s been “dating someone" at night. She doesn’t understand that his “date” is actually Do Ra-mi, whom he monitors secretly when she takes over Mu-hee’s consciousness. Ho-jin doesn't reveal his feelings because Do Ra-mi has warned him that Mu-hee’s anxiety over him is what triggers her split personality.

As much as they plan to stay away from each other, Italy is an adventure. They end up filming at Ho-jin’s mother’s winery, and Mu-hee helps him reconcile with his mom before her wedding. Hiro confesses his love to Mu-hee on camera, and Ho-jin hesitates but ultimately translates the confession to Mu-hee, relaying the words of another man to the woman he loves.

With Hiro’s confession, it’s technically a happy ending for Romantic Trip, but not for Mu-hee and Ho-jin, as they can’t use the show as an excuse to see each other anymore. After Ho-jin leaves for the airport, Mu-hee realizes that both Do Ra-mi and Ho-jin wished for her happiness using the same words. This triggers her memories of everything Do Ra-mi did and how Ho-jin protected her all week in Italy.

Mu-hee texts Ho-jin before he gets on the plane, and he comes back. She tells him that now she remembers living as Do Ra-mi, she’s afraid to tell him her true feelings because he knows her deepest secrets. She tells him to reject her. Ho-jin, now aware of how she self-sabotages in order to protect herself from getting hurt, tells her that if she can’t believe in everlasting love, he won’t promise it to her. Since they’re bound to break up anyway, he says, they should make a pact to not break up for at least the next month. For Mu-hee, who has never trusted promises of unconditional love, this assurance that their relationship has an “expiration date” is strangely comforting. 

They spend the night together in Italy. Later, when Mu-hee gets caught in a scandal, she pretends to be Do Ra-mi to break up with him, sparing him the trouble of dating a disgraced actress. He sees through her charade, however, and knows Do Ra-mi no longer controls her. He tells her he’d never break up over a scandal — especially since they promised not to break up this month. He says they’ll break up one day, just not now.

What is Do Ra-mi’s true identity?

A psychiatrist tells Mu-hee that since she and Do Ra-mi can talk to each other, Do Ra-mi might not represent a different side of her — it may be something else. When Mu-hee’s abusive aunt and uncle threaten to expose her past if she embarrasses them in front of Ho-jin (they want his family’s old books), she tells them Ho-jin knows everything.

The truth is that Mu-hee’s father refused to marry her mother, so her mother poisoned him with a cake. Then, she tried to poison Mu-hee in a murder-suicide attempt on her birthday. Mu-hee fell off the balcony while she tried to run away. She pretended not to remember to avoid blame, and that trauma caused her mind to create Do Ra-mi — who is really the image of her mother. They look so similar that Mu-hee thought the image was Do Ra-mi. It was a trauma-based association of her mother’s face telling her hurtful things.

What happens to Ji-sun, Jin-suk, Yong-u, and Hiro?

Ji-sun, the reality TV producer who initially joined Romantic Trip to complicate things between Mu-hee and Ho-jin, finds unexpected love herself. After breaking off her engagement to Ho-jin’s half-brother Jin-suk, she begins a relationship with Yong-u (Choi Woo-sung), Mu-hee’s devoted manager.

Hiro makes peace with being rejected by Mu-hee, and accepts that his reticent attitude — including telling Mu-hee his feelings too late — has cost him opportunities. He learns how important it is to have more agency in his life, and he decides to study Korean and English, to be able to speak for himself.

How does the series end?

Because young Mu-hee pretended she did not remember anything before her fall, the adults around her decided to tell her that her parents died that night. But the truth is that the ambulance arrived in time and both her parents survived — her dad lives abroad and is in contact with her aunt and uncle; her mom disappeared but didn’t die. Mu-hee contacts her dad through her uncle to find out what happened to her mom. She decides to go visit her mom to hopefully get closure.

Before she leaves to find her mom, however, Mu-hee tells Ho-jin that she would like to “break up” for a little bit — not because she wants to truly end things, but because she needs to face her childhood wounds alone while she finds her mom. Ho-jin believes her, and agrees to “break up” for a little while.

“The fact that Mu-hee says ‘let’s break up’ first to Ho-jin means that [they have so] much trust,” Go Youn-jung explains. “There’s already so much certainty about [their] feelings [for each other], meaning she believes him [when he says he loves her]. And now there’s no more anxiety, and she’s receiving and giving stable love to Ho-jin. Believing that, she decides, ‘Now I’ll go alone and face my childhood wounds.’ So I felt it was a scene showing Mu-hee had grown.”

We don’t know whether Mu-hee actually ends up finding and meeting her mother. Kim Seon-ho thinks that the ambiguous ending is hopeful: “Going to face her darkest inner self and the appearance she wanted to avoid — that growth is very meaningful. So I definitely think [Mu-hee] met her mom.”

Whether Mu-hee meets her mother literally, or simply symbolically confronts that part of herself, the journey represents her transformation from someone who believed herself unworthy of love to someone ready to accept it fully. She returns from the trip and meets Ho-jin at the observatory. They kiss, neither afraid nor holding onto the past — only each other.

“Everyone has their own language,” Kim Seon-ho says. “To understand a person; actions, eye contact, tone of voice, and even physical touch are all languages too.”

“They don’t always understand each other, yet nevertheless they learn how to understand each other’s hearts,” Go Youn-jung adds. 

Can This Love Be Translated? is streaming on Netflix now.