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| Fiction Grand Prize winner Hannah Quinn Hertzog |
She first began translating Korean literature four years ago when she took the "Readings in Korean Literature and Culture" course, taught by professor Cho Hee-kyoung, in her third year of university. The class focused on reading Korean short stories and translating them into English as a way of learning Korean beyond what was offered in the basic language courses.
"I remember reading short stories by Kim Ae-ran and being captivated by the way she describes everyday situations and objects in ways I had never thought of before ― it made me see my own world in a new light," Hertzog said. "I've been interested in languages ever since I was in elementary school, but I think that was the class that made me realize that translation is my passion."
After graduation, she flew to Korea to take a two-year fellowship program at the Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea) Translation Academy and graduated this June, before attending the academy's first ever Cultural Contents translation course over the summer. Hertzog received the LTI Korea Translation Award for Aspiring Translators for her translation of Hwang Jung-eun's short story "Gravedig" last month.
Hertzog translated Kim Un-su's short story "Jab" for The Korea Times' Translation Award.
"Before, I thought that literature had to be serious and depressing. Kim Un-su proved that idea wrong. His stories have an underlying playfulness that make it hard to put his books down," Hertzog said. "In Jab particularly, I was drawn in by the deadpan humor with which the main character narrates his story. The ridiculousness of his situation combined with his own apathy towards that situation made it a lot of fun to both read and to translate."
She said the toughest thing while translating "Jab" was bringing the voice of each character into English without losing the story's subtle humor.
"Little things like using a higher-level vocabulary than expected can change the tone of a sentence from factual to sarcastic, and so I spent a good amount of time looking for the words in English that would carry over Kim Un-su's humor. Finding a word in English that corresponds perfectly to both the definition and, more importantly, the nuance of a word in Korean is a difficult task," she said.
Hertzog thinks a good literary translation is one that fluently delivers the author's message to readers in as similar a tone to the original work as possible.
"Good translators play around with the original text to find what sounds most natural in the target language and gives readers of the translation a similar experience as those reading the original. There's room in translation for creativity and flexibility on the translator's part. This creativity is where translations can go from reading like a translation to reading smoothly and allowing readers to truly connect with the original author," she said.
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