Chi-Young Kim is one of the best known young translators of Korean fiction. To this date, she has translated and published five Korean novels in English: I have the Right to Destroy Myself (2007) and Your Republic is Calling You (2010) by Kim Young-ha, Toy City (2007) by Lee Dong-ha, Tongue (2009) by Jo Kyung-ran, and most recently Please Look After Mom (2011) by Shin Kyung-sook. Kim and I recently conducted an e-mail interview.
SOV: You’ve translated a fair number of important Korean books into English now. Were there meaningful differences in the kinds of challenges they posed for you as a translator?
CYK: All the books I’ve translated posed different challenges. Kim Young-ha’s books, for example, contained scenes around cardgames/hwatu, cars, sports, and video games. Stereotypically, I know next to nothing about those topics, so a major concern was conveying those scenes authentically. So, for example, I didn’t know anything about StarCraft, and in Your Republic Is Calling You, there is a whole section detailing the action on someone’s computer screen. I looked up the terminology of different characters and weapons, did a draft of that section, then found someone who plays StarCraft to read it over and give me pointers. That person edited that section with the language StarCraft aficionados use. In Tongue, the biggest challenge was the stream of consciousness writing style. When you directly translate the way the author wrote into English, none of it made much sense. I had to be very careful about keeping the tone and mood of the original while making sure to convey the meaning in a clear way.
For Please Look After Mom, the fact that the Korean original doesn’t always name the characters threw me for a loop. As you know, in Korean it’s easy to figure out who’s speaking, what the relationship is between the people speaking, or what the mood or tone of voice is, even without much description. I had to be very conscious of how someone with no knowledge of Korean would understand the dialogue, as well as the underlying sentiments and unspoken feelings. Also, the editor I worked closely with was confused by the fact that none of the cities were named, and that several universities were just referred to as Y University. All Koreans know what university that is, but we ended up being very specific about those types of names after consulting with the author. I had the most interactive experience doing Please Look After Mom. The editor would ask questions and make suggestions, and I would answer what I could and ask the author to clarify, or if she could add more or delete, depending on the editor’s suggestion. Then, the author would weigh in with her ideas and preferences, which I then conveyed to the editor. So it was truly a collaborative project.
SOV: I’ve always found the convention of using letters for names, universities, cities in Korean literature a little puzzling. In the case of Y University, it’s understood by most Korean readers, but there are cases in modern & contemporary Korean literature where the names of the characters are just referred to as K, living in city H and whatnot. I wonder if this convention has origins in European/Russian modern literature, and how much of it had to do with censorship… Maybe it has something to do with the relatively small size of Korea — a way perhaps to reach a kind of universality that a named locality would foreclose…
Are there any helpful principles of literary translation that you learned from other translators? Or others you’ve come across yourself?
CYK: One tip from a veteran translator that I found indispensable was to edit and keep editing, even when you think it’s done. Every time you read your work, you end up finding something you can change, a better word or expression, or something that doesn’t work. Also, having native English speakers with no knowledge of Korean read the text is extremely helpful. As a translator, awkward expressions can sometimes sound fine, because you know what it means in Korean. For the audience I’m translating for (which is the mass reading public), I believe that a Korean translation should read as if it weren’t a translation. So it helps to have someone who is completely foreign to Korean to really pick out what is awkward.
SOV: While we’re on the subject of talking with other translators — right now, I happen to be reading Three Generations (1931) by Yom Sang-seop. The book is translated, of course, by Yu Youngnan, who happens to be your mother. I am curious about what it was like for you to grow up as a daughter of an established translator. (And perhaps this next question follows naturally) and in what ways did it influence your decision to translate? Have you collaborated on projects before? What kinds of translation-related conversations do you guys have?
CYK: It was just normal, growing up with a translator as a mother, because I don’t know what it’s like not to grow up like that. She was always reading throughout my childhood, both to me and my sister and by herself, and reading was very important in our family. We went to the library all the time, checking out something like 15 to 20 books at a time (whatever the maximum was), and going back the next week to get new ones. Since we moved around a lot, reading was one way to keep up with my Korean and English. I read many of the Korean classics while living in Canada, while also reading a lot of Steinbeck, Henry James, Dickens in Korea. I also read a lot of the French and Russian greats translated into English. I also read certain books both in Korean and English. When I was very young, I read Anne of Green Gables in Korean, and when I was older, I reread it in English; I did the same with Les Miserables. I only realized when I was much older, when I read Les Mis in English, that the main character’s name was Jean Valjean; since it was 장발장 in Korean, I’d thought his name was Long Haired Jean! When I got older, we would sometimes talk about what she was translating, how she was handling certain passages, and I started to read her translations when I was in junior high and high school. So it never was a conscious decision to translate; honestly, when I was living in New York, working in publishing for pennies, I just decided to do it on the side to make a few extra bucks. Then I realized how much I enjoyed doing it, and the rest is history.
Now, we often talk about what we’re translating, and pick each other’s brains about word choice, or flow, or whatever. We also read what the other is working on and give comments. It’s invaluable, because she has decades of experience, and really good ideas on how to solve sticky issues that come up. Since my Korean isn’t as good as my English, and I’m not very good at reading Chinese characters, it’s very helpful to have her help when there is Chinese in the text, or if I am unsure of what a specific word should be translated as. Oh, and since I haven’t lived in Korea as an adult, there are so many things that I just don’t know about. Like, I didn’t know that 처음처럼 (literal translation: “like the first time”) was the name of a soju, so I kept translating it in a weird way, until my mom sent me a picture of the soju bottle.
SOV: Can you elaborate on any recurring differences in sensibility (정서) that you find difficult to get across when you translate? As a translator, I think you also get accustomed to the comparative strengths and weaknesses of a language, because you’re finding yourself measuring one with the other. Can you talk about that?
CYK: I find several things challenging when I translate Korean into English. One is repetition: Korean novels can meander and repeat words or phrases or parts of scenes, but that doesn’t translate well into English. It tends to read like a mistake. And to find the right balance between the author’s voice and English literary conventions is fairly difficult. Another is the fluidity of tenses. For Please Look After Mom, there was a lot of confusion among English speaking readers about the chronology of events, especially when a character, in the middle of a present scene, reminisces about past events, and from there, refers to past events that are closer to the present, or even further in the past. The editor, the author, and I, played with page breaks and making new paragraphs and moving paragraphs around before we settled on the final version. As for dialects or honorifics, I usually don’t even try to translate those, unless the original mentions it specifically, and even then, I just translate the dialogue in straight English. (Like, so and so started using the informal form of speech, or something.) I’ve read some translations where certain saturi is made into an American southern dialect, and that feels jarring and out of place.
SOV: Tell us more about your relationship with translation in general. For one, you’ve been frighteningly productive, publishing five book-length translations in the span of four years.
CYK: I have always been translating on the side, from when I was an editor at Archipelago Books in New York, through law school, as a practicing attorney, and now as I work at a museum. (I left my firm last year.) My first love was literature, so it’s kind of a nice way to be able to do what I love, while not having to worry about my next paycheck. Also, I appreciate how my diverse jobs have, in many ways, informed my translating life. Since I don’t have all the time in the world to complete translations, I am forced to be very choosy about what projects I take on, and to be extremely efficient at it. I use every tiny chunk of time; when I’m on a plane, traveling somewhere, when I’m on lunch break at work, evenings, weekends, and vacations. When I was working in publishing, one of the most difficult aspects of that job was that many writers and translators were unable to meet deadlines, which made it difficult for us to get the books out to our distributor, to reviewers, and to properly do the marketing and events. Because I know the impact of a missed deadline firsthand, I always try to get manuscripts and edits in on time.
And, as a translator, I’ve noticed that I read differently, even when I’m reading for pleasure. I often note interesting word choices, a smoothly rendered dialogue, among other things. I find myself reading a lot of English translations from other languages. One thing I have always noticed is the fact that a translator can’t really scrub away where he or she is from; some translators are clearly British, while others are obviously American. I know that my style tends to be very American and young, which I consciously try to be less obvious about, especially when the Korean original doesn’t fit that tone. I don’t have any answers as to what to do about that, but it’s always interesting to read translations and be able to see a glimmer of the translator throughout the pages.
(For Part 2 of this interview, click here.)
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Seeking second opinions from “native English speakers with no knowledge of Korean” can be helpful, but I would think it more productive to consult native English speakers with at least some knowldge of Korean.
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Chi-young Kim completely understates how difficult it is to translate Korean into English. Having worked as a copy editor in Korea for numerous English-language communications firms and Korean-based English-language media outlets, translating Korean into English is actually NOT a collaborative process at all, as she alleges, but rather the domain of native English-speaking copy editors who have the skill of a good editor with some knowledge of Korean in order to fill in the Korean cultural blanks and smooth over Korean linguistic and grammatical quirks to make the topsy turvy world of Korean-to-Konglish translations comprehensible to an English-speaking public.
That said, in Korea, Korean-to-Konglish translators are a dime a dozen (even a Korean high school student can pull off some variety of Korean translations), however, the quality of translations tend to be in the absolutely worthless to average range (almost no Koreans are completely bi-cultural to pull off an error-free English translation on their own — they absolutely need an English-speaking copy editor to fix it up and rewrite it for them).
Also, I completely believe her when she says she was unable to translate certain Korean words, expressions or passages that were heavy with specialized vocabulary, for example jargon related to Starcraft players, Hwatu, etc. For her, without the context of having actually been a part of that subculture by having experiences all of the nuances and expressions related to the game and its terminology, rules, etc., she was a fish out of water — i.e., basically unable to grasp the full meaning or even its essential meaning in Korean to translate in another language, let alone English.
This is the perpetual dilemma of “high-context” languages like Korean — unless you are privy to the subject matter at hand, whether it be Starcraft, Hwatu, quantum mechanics, Buddhism, military science, economics, sociology, medical terminology, finance, carpentry, etc. — either through direct experience or formal education (In Korean, you cannot teach yourself specialized vocabulary words in Hangeul due to the existence of hundreds and hundreds of homonyms, i.e., words that sound and are spelled the same in Korean, which have hundreds of different unrelated meanings according to context, usage and underlying Chinese character) — there is no way you can know the correct meaning in Korean let alone translate it properly. \
This is why Korean-to-Konglish translators can never render perfect translations. Native English copy editors, however, with just a basic understanding of Korean, can render high quality copy in English on almost any topic without actually being privy to the subject at hand. This is entirely due to the fact that English as a “low-context” language makes it easy for any functionally literate person to leverage their knowledge of foreign roots, cognates and derivatives to make analytical sense of what they’re reading with a high degree of accuracy (with the exception of highly technical terms and fields of endeavor like medicine, law, science, etc.) Nevertheless, a functionally literate person in English can command an extremely high degree of technical comprehension with very little effort or memorization involved. Consequently, an English-language copy editor can literally fill in the blanks of knowledge or experience that the Korean translator cannot provide to an amazingly high degree of authenticity and accuracy.
As a Korean American doing Korean-to-Konglish copy editing, this became my specialty and I became extremely adept in copy editing Konglish translations where many words or expressions were usually roundabout guesses on part of the translator, or his/her lengthy explanations into polished English-language copy. Of course, some projects took longer than others — for example, talking about medical technology was much more difficult than talking about arts and entertainment — however, without a good copy editor, many Korean translators would be unable to get any credit for their work, let alone have a job.
Having said that, how many times did I have to “collaborate” with translators? Apart from newspaper work, where the translator/guilty party was sitting literally across the news desk from you, usually never. (In fact, having the translator hanging around breathing down your neck trying to interfere with the editing process was usually more trouble than it’s worth.)
Korean-to-English translators definitely have a place in the hierarchy of Korean-to-English translation work. However, there place — rightfully so — is at the bottom and must be subordinate to the copy editor in order for the translation process to work out, as the English-language copy editor is the one who is responsible for turning unusable Konglish translations into comprehensible native-English prose.
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