K-pop fandom glossary
Livestream Korean is full of fandom shorthand. Machine translators render these words literally, which is how 최애 becomes "most favourite" and 애교 becomes "cuteness". Here is what they actually mean — and what Echo's ~770-term glossary is protecting when it captions a live.
| Korean | Romanised | What it means | Why translators miss it |
|---|---|---|---|
| 애교 | aegyo | A performed, deliberately cute manner — voice, gestures, expressions — usually done on request during a live. | Translated literally as "cuteness" or "charm", which loses the fact that it is a performance fans ask for by name. |
| 최애 | choe-ae | Your favourite member — your bias. Literally the "most loved" one. | Comes out as "most favourite" or "the best love", which reads like broken English rather than fandom vocabulary. |
| 오빠 | oppa | How a woman addresses an older man she is close to — used by fans toward older male idols. | Flattened to "older brother", which implies family and misses the affection and hierarchy the word carries. |
| 막내 | maknae | The youngest member of a group. | Becomes "the youngest one", losing the role it names — the maknae has a specific position in group dynamics. |
| 컴백 | comeback | A new release and its promotion cycle — not a return after an absence. | Left as "comeback" but interpreted as returning from a break, which changes the meaning of the whole sentence. |
| 덕질 | deokjil | The act of being a fan — collecting, streaming, following, going to events. | Translated as "hobby" or "obsession", neither of which is how fans use it about themselves. |
| 입덕 | ipdeok | The moment you became a fan of a group or member. | Usually rendered as an unrelated literal phrase because it is a compound slang term. |
| 본진 | bonjin | Your main group — the fandom you belong to first. | Comes out as "headquarters" or "main camp", its non-fandom military meaning. |
| 직캠 | fancam | A single-member camera cut of a performance, usually filmed or edited by fans. | Rendered as "direct cam", which is meaningless to an English- or Chinese-reading fan. |
| 응원법 | eungwonbeop | The official fan chant for a song — the words and timing fans shout together. | Becomes "cheering method", which no fan would recognise. |
| 브이앱 / 라이브 | V App / live | A livestream broadcast by an idol. | Transliterations of app names often come back as unrelated words. |
| 포카 | poca | Photocard — the collectible card included with an album. | Shortened slang that generic translators leave untranslated or turn into "poka". |
Why this matters for captions
In a livestream, these words appear constantly and in fast, unfinished sentences. A translator that treats them as ordinary vocabulary produces captions that are technically about the right topic and completely wrong in tone. Echo pins fandom terms and official name spellings so a caption reads the way a fan would write it.
Echo's glossary covers roughly 770 terms, including official idol and group name spellings. It is applied live, while the stream is playing, not as a post-edit.
See it working
Echo's Audio mode captions a Weverse, YouTube or Bubble livestream in real time into English, 繁體中文 or 简体中文, in a floating overlay above the stream. The free tier includes 5 minutes a day with no account.