Family enterprise
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By Chi-Young Kim
I finally submitted The Investigation, my large translation project. That final week, I spent every spare moment fine-tuning the manuscript, a task made even more arduous by a wedding for which we had to travel to the Midwest. With a sick toddler. Luckily, my daughter had gotten over the worst of the hacking cough/fever combination. Unfortunately, both my husband and I’d experienced disjointed sleep for two weeks and hadn’t been able to take off a single day. This minor health crisis put me behind schedule, so I printed out the entire manuscript and lugged it with me to the airport.
My husband also trundled it with him, as I’d tasked him to read through the text to see if anything was jarring. Although he reads more nonfiction than fiction, he has a keen eye for detail and a good memory for historical facts, and most of all, he’s a willing (and free) native speaker-reader. Also, since he doesn’t know Korean, any expression that sounds normal to my ears but odd in English sticks out like a sore thumb to him.
A crucial step to producing a good translation is having a native speaker of the target language edit it. Since my goal is to reduce the times when a reader might cock his or her head in confusion, I need someone who knows nothing about Korean to give it an honest, thorough read. Before, I’d asked the help of friends who were more literarily inclined, but even with bribes of meals and drinks, many had difficulty meeting deadlines. Or, since it wasn’t a paying gig, their comments weren’t as thorough as I wanted. I never held it against them, of course. After all, they were doing me a favor, and I wouldn’t have been able to do as good a job if I were in their shoes, either ― we all had day jobs and our own literary ambitions.
Strangely, I never really thought of my husband as a co-pilot on any of my translation ventures until fairly recently. I’d only thought of him as someone who would read my final product as a neutral reader. Not that it ever worked that way, because I always found myself yelling across the house, “In baseball, what do you call the pitcher-catcher relationship? Is there a word for that?” or “If you stick a microchip in water, would it be damaged, or would you have to smash it with something?” I found myself having to explain an entire plot of a novel just to get some feedback on certain word choices, and I quickly discovered that it was more efficient to have him read what I was working on, so we could speak in shorthand over our daughter’s yelps of: “Sit! Mama! Read!”
In any case, I managed to whip through 40-odd pages on the airplane, after my daughter nodded off; we got stuck for an hour on the Interstate on our way to the wedding, so I furiously edited another 30-odd pages in the front seat of the rental car; and the following day, my daughter fell asleep for two hours, enabling both of us to work in silence. Then, I dropped my daughter off to play with her grandparents for a few hours as we finished the remainder. In the evening, before bed, I frantically typed on a borrowed laptop, inputting changes, as my husband entertained our daughter by throwing puzzle pieces around the room while she fetched them.
Because my husband has been reading Korean translations for a decade and we’re always talking about interesting issues inherent in translating literature, he was able to catch a lot of oddities in this manuscript. He remarked that all the characters were always gazing at one another and that their eyes were always described as “deep, dark wells”; he found an error made by the author where a prisoner was digging a tunnel with nothing other than spoons and yet somehow, after emerging, managed to hit a guard with a shovel; and noted that certain passages sounded erotic, even though that wasn’t intended.
Now, my daughter has an endless supply of old manuscripts to scribble on, and my husband has happily returned to reading one of his boring history books for pleasure. I’m finally able to relax, but our family enterprise hasn’t ground to a halt quite yet. I’ve now jumped to editing a manuscript I haven’t touched in six months, and I’m shocked at how truly terrible it is. I’d received a grant for it last year, and I’m going through it carefully, revising, rewriting, and shaking my head. I must have learned a lot in the last six months as I focused on The Investigation, and I’m glad I had all this time to let that first work sit, as I can now look at it with fresh eyes. Also, in the last six months, I’ve come across great vocabulary I can use from other books and magazines, such as what you call an unregistered phone you dump and the flashing light bar on a police cruiser. I’ve already notified my husband to be prepared to comb through another manuscript, stat.
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.