Can This Love Be Translated?

Everything you need to know before you hit play.

Completed
🔥 2026 Rom-Com Hit

Can This Love Be Translated?

이 사랑 통역 되나요? · 2026 · South Korea

WriterHong Jung-eun, Hong Mi-ran

DirectorYoo Young-eun

Episodes12 eps · ~1 hr each

AiredJanuary 16, 2026 (full drop)

GenreRomance · Comedy · Drama

Content RatingTV-MA · 15+ Teens

Netflix

Slow Burn
Globe-Trotting
Entertainment Industry
Interpreter
Psychological

One box. Everything you need to decide.

The people who make this drama worth every minute.

Kim Seon-ho

Joo Ho-jin

Lead

Go Youn-jung

Cha Mu-hee

Lead

Sota Fukushi

Kurosawa Hiro

Supporting

Lee E-dam

Shin Ji-seon

Supporting

Choi Woo-sung

Kim Yong-woo

Supporting

Kim Won-hae

Kim Yeong-hwan

Supporting

Spoiler-light recaps — know what you’re getting into, episode by episode.

EP 01

Lost in Tokyo

January 16, 2026

Mu-hee walks into a ramen shop in Kamakura and begs the stranger sitting across from her — a man she’s never met — to translate her feelings. Ho-jin, already running from his own past, does it anyway. It’s a setup that shouldn’t work as well as it does: two people wrong-footed from the start, in a city that belongs to neither of them. Kim Seon-ho plays the hesitation perfectly. The show’s tone — warm, slightly odd, quietly serious — is established in this single scene.

EP 02

The Overnight Star

January 16, 2026

Mu-hee’s zombie film explodes globally overnight — and so does the gap between who she is and who the world now wants her to be. Ho-jin, now tangentially connected to her through an accidental Instagram post, watches the metamorphosis from a safe distance. Go Youn-jung handles the transition from unknown actress to reluctant superstar with surprising nuance. The comedy lands here precisely because the drama underneath it never fully disappears.

EP 03

Romantic Trip Begins

January 16, 2026

The red carpet collision between Mu-hee and Hiro goes viral, and the Romantic Trip producers read the optics correctly. Ho-jin is pulled in as the show’s interpreter — and suddenly his professional neutrality is the only barrier between Mu-hee’s actual thoughts and the cameras documenting everything. The triangulation between Ho-jin, Mu-hee, and Hiro is established without melodrama. It’s a structure that trusts the audience to feel the tension before anyone names it.

EP 04

Canada, Hard Mode

January 16, 2026

Hiro arrives in the Canadian Rockies determined to make Mu-hee’s life difficult. Ho-jin, wedged between professional duty and something that is beginning to feel like protectiveness, starts quietly reading her — not as a client but as a language he doesn’t yet have grammar for. The Alberta landscapes are genuinely cinematic, and the show uses them well. The shift in Ho-jin’s posture toward Mu-hee is the episode’s real event.

EP 05

Hiro’s Surprise

January 16, 2026

Hiro, despite his determination, finds himself genuinely charmed by Mu-hee — the real one, not the curated version. A new producer enters the picture and stops Ho-jin in his tracks in a way that has nothing to do with the job. Sota Fukushi’s gradual softening is handled with real delicacy: he doesn’t abandon his antagonism all at once but lets it erode naturally. The episode earns the warmth it lands on.

EP 06

Do Ra-mi Steps In

January 16, 2026

Yong-woo and Ji-seon bond over a shared secret that reframes their dynamic. Mu-hee, backed into a corner emotionally, deploys Do Ra-mi as a shield — and the boldness of what follows leaves Ho-jin unsettled in a way his usual logic can’t resolve. The episode where the show signals it is not a straightforward rom-com. Go Youn-jung playing Do Ra-mi for the first extended stretch is genuinely something else.

EP 07

The Novelist Knows

January 16, 2026

Hiro goes to Seoul to sort out his feelings. Kim Yeong-hwan — the old novelist who has been watching Ho-jin’s careful emotional architecture from a comfortable distance — engineers a meetup that Ho-jin attends against his better judgment. Kim Won-hae is wonderful here: a man who has already decoded what the younger characters are still pretending not to feel, and has the patience to wait them out. The conversation about languages is the best-written scene in the series.

EP 08

The Break Point

January 16, 2026

Mu-hee and Do Ra-mi’s relationship becomes a fault line rather than a resource. Awkward collisions with family, friends, and the full Romantic Trip crew push the situation past the point that charm or deflection can manage. Someone makes a drastic call. The episode the Hong sisters use to pivot the drama’s weight toward something heavier — and the tonal shift is handled well enough that viewers who have been paying attention feel it coming before it lands.

EP 09

Italy, Confessions

January 16, 2026

Siena. Hiro tells Mu-hee what he feels. It’s the clearest declaration in the entire series and it lands quietly because Sota Fukushi plays it without asking for anything in return. Ho-jin, meanwhile, hears something from Do Ra-mi that he can’t unknow — and the shock of it registers on his face before he can deploy his usual composure. The Italian locations are at their most beautiful here. The episode earns it.

EP 10

The Winery

January 16, 2026

A Tuscan winery brings Ho-jin face to face with someone from his past he hadn’t prepared to see. Mu-hee begins tracing the root of what Do Ra-mi actually is — not a character, not a habit, but a wound that never finished healing. The episode is quieter than the one before it, which is the right call. The drama is doing something more interesting than a confession: it is showing two people dismantling the defenses they built to avoid needing anyone.

EP 11

The Resurfaced Post

January 16, 2026

The media finds the Instagram post that connects Ho-jin to Mu-hee’s past — and builds a scandal from the gap between what it shows and what it means. Both leads are forced to answer questions they’ve been carefully not asking each other. The episode the series uses to examine what happens when the outside world starts translating your private life for you. Ho-jin’s response is his most emotionally direct moment in the entire run.

EP 12

Finally Understood

January 16, 2026

The finale doesn’t ask for grand gestures. The show has been about two people learning each other’s language — and the ending honors that by making the resolution feel like comprehension rather than conquest. Secrets surface, the right romances settle, and Hiro’s final scene is handled with the same dignity the character was given throughout. What stays with you: not the declarations, but the moment Ho-jin stops translating and just listens. That was always the whole point.

What actually happened in the finale — and what it all means.

The finale opens with an edit screening. Mu-hee and Hiro watch the rough cut of Romantic Trip together. The producers want to include Hiro’s on-camera confession — and his warm reception by Mu-hee — and leave the decision to the actors. Both agree to let it air. It’s a quiet, grown-up moment: two people acknowledging what happened between them without pretending it didn’t.

The love triangle closes on its own terms. Mu-hee apologizes to Hiro — not for how she felt, but for the times Do Ra-mi encouraged his feelings without her consent. He accepts without drama. Separately, Ho-jin meets Ji-seon on a train and finally says out loud what he spent years not saying: that he liked her. She admits she felt the same. They let each other go cleanly. It’s the kind of emotional housekeeping most K-dramas skip, and the show is better for doing it.

Do Ra-mi’s origin is finally revealed. In the Tuscan stretch, Ho-jin had hugged Do Ra-mi — essentially holding the part of Mu-hee that hates herself — and something in that moment shifted. The finale explains why Do Ra-mi existed at all: Mu-hee’s mother had poisoned her father’s birthday cake and tried to force the young Mu-hee to eat it. Mu-hee jumped from a balcony to escape, survived, and was told for decades that her parents had died in an accident. Do Ra-mi looked exactly like her mother. She wasn’t a zombie character that escaped the screen — she was her mother’s face, haunting her from childhood.

The twist: everyone survived. Mu-hee’s adoptive family reveals that her parents are both alive — her mother was never charged, and the poisoning was buried to protect the family’s name. This is the information that breaks the final barrier. Mu-hee cannot stay with Ho-jin while still carrying a secret she has never confronted. She chooses to leave Korea and find her birth mother. Ho-jin, for once, does not try to interpret the situation into something manageable. He just waits.

The secondary couple earns the sweetest ending. Ji-seon and Yong-woo, the drama’s more straightforwardly joyful pair, reveal their engagement to the Romantic Trip crew at a Christmas celebration. Hiro, meanwhile, decides to stop avoiding the projects he had been reluctant to take — the show leaves him pointed toward his own future, not defeated by his unrequited feelings. He even learned Korean. The ensemble exits the series better than they entered it.

The finale’s last image is a dark sky reserve. Mu-hee returns from her trip — the show doesn’t show the confrontation, only the aftermath — and texts Ho-jin to meet her under the Milky Way they had once talked about seeing together. She arrives with a bouquet of clovers, uses her phone’s translation app to tell him how much she missed him in every language, and Ho-jin — the man who has spent twelve episodes turning other people’s feelings into words — is finally, completely lost for words. They kiss. The observatory dome opens above them. Some things don’t need translation. They just need time.