Translation of Ahn Jung-geuns Treatise Gets Acknowledgement
By Cho Jae-hyon
Staff Reporter
Franklin Rausch, a doctoral candidate at the University of British Columbia, and his co-worker have received a translation award from the Center for the Study of Korea at the University of Toronto for their version of Ahn Jung-geun's treatise.
Rausch and Han Ji-eun of Sungkyunkwan University were awarded the James Scarth Gale Translation Award for 2009 for their joint translation of Ahn's "A Treatise on Peace in the East" into English, the school said.
"The translation together with an introduction is excellent resources for those teaching modern Korea," it said.
Their work is available on the center's Web site (https://www.utoronto.ca/csk/prize.html).
"It was really an honor to receive this award. I am especially happy that our translation will be made available on the internet as that will make it easier for English-speaking people to have direct access to Ahn's thoughts," Rausch told The Korea Times.
The prize is awarded annually for translations of historical documents from 1894 to the present. The objective of this award is to promote, and make public, materials useful for teachers of undergraduate courses on modern Korea, the center said.
Rausch said he enjoyed translating Ahn's treatise with Han.
"Through our work I was able to gain a greater understanding of how Koreans of his time understood and sought to overcome the difficulties they and other East Asian countries faced," he said.
He said the translation is part of their efforts to put Ahn's writing into English, including his autobiography. "We are hoping to publish our translations before too long," he said.
Ahn was an independence fighter who assassinated Hirobumi Ito, the first Japanese resident-general of Korea, who spearheaded the island country's forced annexation of Korea. Ahn fired a round of shots and killed Ito on a railway platform in Harbin, Manchuria, on Oct. 26, 1909.
The award is named after James Scarth Gale, a Canadian missionary who had a deep appreciation for Korean culture, especially Korean literature. He was a noted translator.
The University of Toronto is hoping to publicize their contest so that more people will enter and make use of the available translations. They also hope that teachers will download and use them in their classes.