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.

(For Part 1 of this interview, click here.)

SOV: I really like what you said about dialogue — the importance of “underlying sentiments and unspoken feelings.” There are all kinds of subtextual cues about the way characters talk and behave towards each other that usually help us understand characters better. Literal translations of dialogue often run the risk of destroying any sense of a lively interaction between speakers. I remember being especially impressed by the fluency of all the colloquialisms in your translation of Kim Young-ha’s first book (I know from experience how hard it can be to keep these sooth). Can you talk about specific instances of slang or idiomatic expressions that you might have struggled with? (I think it might help less-experienced translators to hear how you work through these specific issues.)

CYK: I can’t think of anything specific about the slang/colloquialisms in I Have the Right to Destroy Myself (it’s been several years…) but I was just working on something recently, where a prostitute says to her customer, “자기 멋져.” I kept coming back to that, because not only do you have to convey the meaning behind it, you also have to make it sound authentic. I don’t think a woman in that situation would say, “Honey, you’re great.” I thought about how prostitutes spoke to each other in books and movies. In the past year, I’d read Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin, which has several prostitutes as the main characters. I thought about how he had described that world, and how those characters spoke, and settled on “Baby, you’re awesome,” for now. It still doesn’t feel 100% right to me, so I’ll probably revisit it later, after I have some more time to think about it. Usually, I’ll put something down in my first draft, as a place holder, and then go back to it again and again. Often, I’ll ask people around me what they think someone would say in a certain situation. Frequently it isn’t until the last moment that I settle on something, and even then, that’s not the end of it. Since the editorial process at publishing companies take a year or so, in that time various copy editors/editors may make better suggestions, or I might think of something more fitting. Time and willingness to be open to other suggestions are two very important factors when I try to find the perfect expression for things like that. Continue reading →