By Brother Anthony and Professor Min Eun-kyung
We were happy to see that this year, too, a good number of people have submitted work for The Korea Times Translation Awards.
Generally speaking, it seems that there are more and more good translations being made of Korean literature, even though it remains true that very few publishers in the English-speaking world show any interest in them.
This year, the overall quality of the submissions was really encouraging. Of course, there are always a few entries where the quality of the English is quite poor, allowing us to establish an initial shortlist. This year, however, for fiction, we still found ourselves confronted with eight entries after that first elimination, out of a total of fifteen. With the poetry, too, it was not very easy to establish any kind of shortlist.
We have no idea as to the identity of the translators while we are judging the entries. Also, we try not to let ourselves be unduly influenced by the choice of writer or work.
We are always looking for translations which are both accurate and faithful to the Korean, and understandable when read in English. Still, in the last stages, we cannot help being influenced to some degree by the quality of the original.
There are times when we have to wonder if a given short story was really worth all the effort the translator put into translating it.
This year there was only one fiction entry that translated a complete novel, the rest were more or less short stories.
We decided to give the main award to the translation of the novel," "Bicycling Over the Ocean" by Mun Hyung-ryul, not simply because it was longer. The main reason was that from beginning to end we felt comfortable with the English style and were not really conscious of reading a translation.
It must also be said that we found the novel more satisfying as a work of literature than any of the short stories others had chosen. Finally, the ability to maintain accuracy and smoothness of style throughout 241 A4 pages deserves a special degree of recognition.
The two short stories selected for commendation awards were both translated very well, but each had a few places where the English seemed slightly awkward.
There can be two reasons for this. The first is simply a matter of time; it is usually necessary to leave a draft translation alone for a few days, then come back to it with fresh eyes to polish the style.
Quite often we are then struck by small details needing correction that we were unable to notice previously. Another reason why the English of an otherwise good translation is sometimes marred has to do with the power of the original language, which dominates a translator's mind. This happens whether the translator is a native speaker of English or of Korean, and is especially frequent among people who are conscientiously determined to produce a very accurate translation.
As a result, they unconsciously imitate exactly in English the grammatical structure or word order of the Korean, not sensing that it is necessary to be rather freer in order to produce a natural-sounding translation.
In addition, the translator of Hwang Jung-eun's "The Door" was faced with a particular challenge. It is quite easy to tell a story in Korean without ever indicating the gender of the main character, Korean not having any equivalent of the English "he" and "she" or "his" and "hers."
Some Korean writers deliberately exploit this ambiguity, as this writer has done here, and the translator felt obliged to try to maintain the same uncertainty in the English translation.
This resulted in a few rather uncomfortable substitutions of "the" for "his/her" and we would encourage the translator to look at those passages again to see if the uncertainty really needs to be preserved.
Regarding poetry, where only one prize can be given, we had to read and re-read several of the 13 entries before deciding that the translator of poems by Ko Jae-jong was the person who had produced the most convincing versions. Several other translations, interesting at first sight, proved on closer examination to be rather too inaccurate.
Translating poetry requires a special skill in the last stages, if the versions are going to work as poetry in English, and we felt that the version of poems by Ko Jae-jong was the only entry that had that special quality.
We would also like to encourage the translators who have not received awards to go on working. There is a lot of Korean literature, old and recent, that is worth reading outside of Korea, and for that we are urgently in need of many young, eager translators.
Many of the people who submitted translations this year surely have what it takes to become successful translators, even if for one reason or another they did not win a prize, and we want to encourage them to continue to hone their skills and produce fine translations in the future. At the same time, we must congratulate the award-winners.
The time we spent reading the entries was amply rewarded by the joy of discovering their work and we are already looking forward to a similar joy next year.