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Over the years, I've received criticism about my approach to translation.
I'm not too bothered by it, as there are different philosophies. There's the camp of translating every word literally, even though that tactic renders the text too foreign and awkward for many readers.
However, when translating for a wider audience, I believe in massaging the text to ensure that the person reading the translated text comes away with the same experience as a reader of the original text. Of course, this isn't possible all the time, but I strive to achieve that level of fluidity.
As the bridge between two languages and cultures, my role as a translator is to ensure that the English language reader isn't pulled out of the text because of something that is confusing, but feels the same emotions and understands a scene as a Korean reader would.
Some critics are unhappy with my translation of Shin Kyung-sook's "Please Look After Mom," saying my work strays too far from the original or taking issue with particular passages. But a literal translation, where the text is translated word for word, fails the original work and the author's intent.
For example, there is a bit of dialogue in "Please Look After Mom" that mentions the mom's character not wanting to be buried under her sister-in-law. This confused American editors, since Western graves and Korean graves are structured differently. They thought that meant bodies piled on top of each other.
In this regard, it was a hindrance for me to be equally comfortable in both cultures, because I didn't immediately notice that this would be confusing to an English reader.
After I explained what a Korean gravesite looked like, we all agreed to add a few words to the dialogue to make it clear that the gravesite in question was down the slope from the first grave.
I belatedly came across a paper that discusses "Please Look After Mom" as a global social mobility story. The article was published in an academic journal last year. I don't have any issue with the thesis the paper puts forth; I don't even pretend to understand the significance of this paper on its particular field, as I have never even taken an undergraduate course in this discipline.
What I have a problem with is the cavalier attitude they have toward my work, and toward translation as an art and profession. On the very first page of this paper, the authors state in a footnote, "We corrected some of the awkward sentences found in the English translation of Shin's novel." At first, I didn't take offense. After all, their focus is to use this novel to make an argument about something else.
But when I took a close look at what they deemed "awkward," I was appalled; their word-for-word re-translation of select phrases rendered the text more awkward, robbing it of its fluidity.
One example is below. The first is mine:
You have to work hard in school so that you can move into a better world.
The authors' edits:
You have to study hard so that you can get to another world.
Although they deem the first version more awkward, it is clear to most English speakers that their "edits" are more muddying than clarifying. What does "another world" even mean? Reading that phrase in Korean, it becomes instantly clear that it means "a better world." English demands precision in a way that Korean does not, and as such the reader is now robbed of the immediate recognition of Shin's phrase.
To be fair, the authors do mention in the article that the edits they made to the translation weren't to suggest that my work is mistaken or flawed but to show that the original text is "more steeped in cosmopolitan striving that the translation reveals." But in the above example, they have erased the very "striving" they claim to unearth, as the upward mobility connoted by "another world" in Korean is muddied in English.
It puzzles me that two accomplished academics, who have completed years of study in their field, could so callously launch into another discipline without any regard for the training it takes to be similarly accomplished in that one.
It is also curious that the authors believed that their attempt to edit the translated text got to the true meaning of the original.
It goes to show that knowledge of a language and culture, which I assume these two authors have, does not necessarily mean they understand literary translation.
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.
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