Fiction Commendation Prize Winner: Jasmine Jeemin Lee

Jasmine Jeemin Lee

By Anna J. Park

Jasmine Jeemin Lee is a freelance Korean-English translator and interpreter. She grew up moving back and forth between Korea and the U.S., and graduated from Ewha Womans University Graduate School of Translation and Interpretation earlier this year.

Having been always an avid reader, she began to translate literary works during graduate school: “I was fascinated by literary translation and had so much fun translating various Korean works including short stories and drama scripts into English.”

She chose to translate novelist Kim Se-hee's short story “Still Days” as it resonated with her.

“I liked how Kim turned a rather ordinary, mundane story into something that's highly relatable for readers,” she said. “I could very well put myself into the protagonist's shoes, and imagine how she must have felt as a first-time employee ― dealing with a difficult team manager and colleagues, working overtime in an empty office, and facing unexpected challenges at her very first workplace ― because I remembered the first time I got a job working for a company before I decided to become a freelance translator and interpreter.”

Lee said one of the biggest challenges was to properly translate the story's title; she went to a literary event to meet with the author to clarify the novelist's intentions with the title.

“I found out that the title had dual meanings. One was that however you may struggle as an individual, it won't make much of a difference for society as a whole; and the other was how some young people continue to live their seemingly ordinary and 'still' days. I wanted to keep that ambiguity of the original Korean title, and came up with 'Still Days,'” she said.

Lee believes a good literary translation should allow readers to have a similar reading experience as the translator does when reading the original text: “There are times when the author intentionally leaves some parts of the text vague or complicated. In such cases, the translation should also appear vague or complicated, even if the translator understands the implications, so as to provide some room for readers to imagine and interpret on their own."

“Although the translator may have to intervene from time to time to make the translated work more readable and seamless, he or she should be careful not to go too far and unravel the mysteries, or get rid of intended ambiguity,” she added.