Abstract
Korea’s webtoons are gaining worldwide popularity particularly as major webtoon platforms have recently launched overseas service, offering translation into different languages. However, there has been fan translation of webtoons even before the official translation was introduced, and continues in spite of official translation service. Against this background, this paper explores webtoon fan translation in comparison with official translation in order to examine the reasons behind continued fan translation and its implications. Online fan community discussions are observed to explore what fans think of official and fan translation, followed by a comparison of cultural items in official and fan translation of two Korean webtoons. Webtoon fan translation can be seen as a way of pop cosmopolitanism enabling fans to learn the source text culture and language, thus moving beyond their local context.
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