By Chi-Young Kim
As a history-French studies double major, I wrote an honors thesis during my senior year of college. I took on a fairly ambitious topic, one that required perusal of a variety of primary sources in both English and French. In addition to historical texts, I analyzed photographs, newspaper articles, biographies, and theater reviews. I spent many hours in the library looking through reams of microfiche, and requested from other collegiate libraries obscure documents my university library didn’t have. I developed a complicated system of cataloguing all of my notes, citations, and ideas ― I jotted down every idea or citation on an index card, referring to the source material, and kept them in rubber band-bound bundles in a shoebox.
By the time I finished my 100-page thesis, I had accumulated hundreds of index cards and a scary stack of 20-odd books that teetered on the edge of my desk. While many of my friends chafed at the slow, often frustrating process of research, I actually enjoyed it quite a bit. Of course, I didn’t like slogging through reams of material, only to come up with nothing I could use (or worse, coming across something that went against the basis of my thesis), but the burst of excitement I felt when I found something spectacular more than made up for it. At the time, I didn’t know how integral research would be in my career as a translator.
Since I translate fiction, it isn’t apparent that I need to conduct research all. But there are so many parts that have to be accurate about before I submit a translated manuscript to an editor. For example, every single book I have translated has included a quote from a famous poet/novel/song/person. It goes without saying that if a Doors song is quoted in a Korean text, I need to find the original instead of attempting to re-translate the Korean into English. Sometimes I do background research, almost the way a copyeditor might. In one novel, there was a passage about the World Trade Center in Manhattan falling during the 9/11 attacks. I read articles and histories to ensure that the timing of the events, the names of the streets, and other information were accurate. As a translator, I don’t want my author do be judged for factual mistakes. For these cases, the Internet is a lifesaver. With the 9/11 example, I discovered that the author used an incorrect term in referring to pieces of the airplane that rained down on the streets; the materials he referred to were no longer used to make airplanes by the time the 9/11 planes were manufactured. When I’m lucky, the source material is easy to find, such as Shakespeare’s plays, well-known poems by Goethe, or play-by-play histories about a very well-known event.
I’m working on a translation right now that contains numerous citations to the works of French poet Francis Jammes. If there is an English translation of his work, I prefer to use that over something I cobble together. (After all, I’m not a French-to-English translator, or even worse, a French-to-Korean-to-English translator!) I quickly found the correct spelling of Jammes’s name as well as the titles of many of his poems. I perused the tables of contents of several Francis Jammes poetry collections translated into English to figure out which edition I needed. I found the edition in my local library system and put in a request for an inter-branch transfer. A few days later, I received notification that my book was ready for pickup. I found the poems I needed in that book, as well as the titles to several other poems referred to in the text.
But I couldn’t find one specific poem. I’m not even sure what the title would be in English, as I googled a variety of different possibilities and came up with none. It could be that I don’t have the correct title (perhaps the translator into the Korean changed it?), or the title is referring to a specific kind of berry that isn’t translatable into Korean, or the poem hasn’t been translated into English. Luckily, since I know French, I will be able to track it down eventually. The more serious problem is when I’m faced with a quote and I have no idea what it’s from.
The only time I remember failing at this endeavor was during my translation of a novel with a quote attributed to Hitler, of all people. I searched online in Korean first, hoping to come across a mention of a book or a speech he made, to help my search in English. Nothing. I looked online in English, using different versions of the sentence. Nothing. The author couldn’t remember where he’d gotten the quote. Google kept pointing me toward white supremacist websites. I tried to scan through them but I soon had to stop. It was too sickening and terrifying, and I was worried that the FBI would discover that I was going around looking for Hitler quotes. In the end, I paraphrased the quote and called it a day. In my book, a slightly less accurate quote is always better than feeling abject terror and paranoid.
Chi-Young Kim is a literary translator based in Los Angeles. She has translated works by Shin Kyung-sook, Kim Young-ha, and Jo Kyung-ran. Contact her at chiyoung@chiyoungkim.com or via her website, chiyoungkim.com.