Translation Diary | Harriett Press

Stella’s Translation Diary #2: Translation is Impossible

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Translation is Impossible

By Stella Kim

Translation is impossible. That’s what I hear in the back of my head every time I sit down in front of my computer. Today I ponder what to do with Korean words, which, when translated into English, contain names of other countries. Take, for instance, the word “패랭이꽃” (paeraengi kkot). It’s a type of wild flower native to China, Korea, Mongolia, and southeastern Russia, according to Wikipedia.

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(A screen shot of Google search of paeraengi kkot)

The flower paeraengi kkot was named so because its shape resembled paeraengi, a type of hat that male merchants used to wear in Joseon Korea (though I can’t really see it).

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(A screen shot from the Encyclopedia of Korean Folk Culture)

In any case, despite the very folksy name it has in Korean, the English term for this flower is “China pink.” Some might not think about this twice, because this is the name of the flower. But I hesitate. I wonder if the insertion of the word “China” in the flower would confuse English readers and have them wonder whether the story is set in Korea or China. That’s probably me being overly concerned. Then I wonder, what if readers think that this is some flower that came from China when it is native to Korea too? What if readers think that even in Korean the flower is called China pink? Is that okay? After thinking about all this, I decide to just call the flower ‘pink’ for the moment.

Then I come across another term: “매화” (maehwa).

Maehwa is the name of the flower of a “매실나무” (maesil namu), commonly known as Chinese plum tree, Japanese plum tree, or Japanese apricot tree.

The fruit, “매실” (maesil), is closer to an apricot than plum, but maehwa is generally translated as “plum blossoms”. Handling this term is a bit easier, because I’ve already thought all I need to on the matter from looking up paeraengi kkot. I decide to go with plum tree and plum blossoms, all the while part of my brain keeps on telling me that maesil is different from the plums that English readers are familiar with.

Flora and fauna native to East Asia have been named in English by people who mostly discovered them from China or Japan, two major superpowers today. So it’s understandable that a tree native to both Korea and China was discovered first in China, what with Korea being closed off to the Western world for a long time. And they would’ve looked at paeraengi kkot and thought, “Hm, that looks like a pink, but we haven’t seen specifically that type of pink. I know! Since this flower is from China, I should call this China pink.” It makes flowers that people haven’t seen more familiar to them, as people would know what a “pink” looked like, yet it also adds a hint of exoticism.

I wonder if similar things happen when an English book is translated into Korean—are words localized? Or are they transliterated? The few I’d consulted mainly seem to transliterate and add footnotes or parenthetical explanations. What about books from different languages translated into English? But then again, what country in the world is similar to Korea, which had been China’s vassal for a long time and even as a sovereign country paid tribute to China in an acknowledgement of China’s strength?

But I can’t change words or add enormous footnotes to the terms I’d like to explain, so I move on.

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Lizzie’s Translation Diary #1: The Translation Process

The Translation Process

By Lizzie Buehler

When I began translating Korean literature six years ago, I felt very uncertain about the process of translation. I knew that I started with a Korean text, and my goal was to produce an elegant-sounding English equivalent (ignoring the fact that there are no true “equivalents” in literary translation). But it took me several years—until I finished my first book-length project, in fact—before I became comfortable with the movement from the initial Korean to the eventual English text. I now have a fairly standard translation process that I stick to regardless of what project I’m working on. This allows me to balance my translation work with my other obligations—my PhD coursework, my own writing, etc.—while still making progress. Sometimes, of course, I fall off course, but the following is the schedule I follow the majority of the time.

1. I start by translating a very rough draft of the Korean text into English. At this point, all I want at the end of the workday is English words on the page that convey all the information in the original Korean. They don’t have to sound good, or even be grammatically correct. They just need to exist. My standard quota per day is three pages. Sometimes I’ve already read the Korean text that I’m translating already, but more often I haven’t. I used to feel like this was a shameful secret I needed to hide, but then I read Spanish translator Gregory Rabassa’s quote about how doing so gives the “translation the freshness that a first reading would have.” I want to translate the text like I’m a reader, experiencing the story for the first time.

2. After I’ve translated a chapter-length segment of the book—usually around twenty or twenty-five pages—I go through what I’ve translated and make the sentences “sound good” in English. This is where I go over the English and compare it with the Korean, too, to make sure that I haven’t made any factual errors in my first draft. I try to go through three pages a day at this stage, too.

3. Once I’ve gone through the second draft of the chapter, I print it out and reread the physical copy, marking it up as I read. Then I made edits accordingly.

4. Now I sent the chapter to a trusted reader—usually a friend or classmate whose readerly opinion I trust—and get their comments. Then I implement those as well—at least, the ones I agree with.

5. Once I’ve implemented my outside reader’s opinions, I give the chapter one more read-over, and then I’m ready to send it off!

6. I start over with the next chapter, and continue with steps 1-5 until the book is finished.

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Stella’s Translation Diary #1: The Beginning

The Beginning

By Stella Kim

One of my favorite quotes about translation comes from Umberto Eco: “Translation is the art of failure.” No matter how well something is translated, it can never capture the original text in its entirety. This quote lingers in my head as I work on translating Painter in the Wind (바람의 화원). My first draft is always full of Korean words I don’t look up, and it’s a literal translation that helps me get a sense of the book as a whole. But translating historical fiction involves an additional step that isn’t usually required by contemporary fiction—understanding the complexities of the time in which it the story is set.

That additional step requires (at times, rather extensive) research. The first sentence in the book that I translate is “아버지의 화실은 꿈을 그리는 공장이었다.” Literally, “Father’s atelier was a factory where dreams were painted.” Then I hesitate, wondering whether the term 공장, or factory, was the correct one in the Korean, considering that this story is set in the late 18th century Korea. The Naver Korean dictionary gives 10 different definitions of the term, each with different Chinese characters with the exception of the last one, which is Jeju dialect and therefore does not have corresponding Chinese characters. Of those, only one—the one meaning factory, a place with manufacturing facilities—makes sense in the given context. Then I google the word to see whether there were factories in Joseon Korea. It turns out there were—these were places run by craftsmen who belonged to the government. Then just to make sure, I look up the term “factory” to see when the English term began to be used and find out that the word “factory” came into use around the early 17th century. Then I think “mill” is another term that could be used instead, as it has been around for longer than “factory.” But then again, unless it’s preceded by “steel” or “silk” or some other descriptive term, the default definition for mill is a place equipped with machinery for grinding grain into flour. “Workshop” could be another one, so I changed my translation to “Father’s atelier was a factory/workshop where dreams were painted.” Workshop could work, since most people would associate the word factory with heavy machinery and assembly lines that we are oh-so-familiar with today. But the word “atelier” already means a workshop, so perhaps that wasn’t what the author intended. Maybe he did mean that it was like a factory. So after ten minutes of research, I’m back to my original sentence: “Father’s atelier was a factory where dreams were painted.”

Not every sentence requires 10 minutes research (thank goodness), and some of the decisions are made in split seconds, like my decision not to use the term “plant.” But I make sure to note the importance of looking over even the most straight-forward sentences in detail for anachronism, among other issues.

And as I translate the rest of the first paragraph, I return to the first sentence, thinking perhaps it should be “Father’s atelier had been a factory where dreams were painted” or ““Father’s atelier used to be a factory where dreams were painted.” But at the moment I’m unsure, so I highlight the sentence and move on.

Other words in the following paragraphs that stop me include: 도제, 아교, and 앞가리개. They’re not words often seen in Korean fiction with a contemporary setting. I can kind of deduce what they mean from the context—도제 could be apprentice; 아교 I’m unsure but something used for painting that is boiled; and 앞가리개 literally means front cover, but I think it refers to an apron. After translating a few paragraphs, I realize that I’m rather unfamiliar with discussing paintings—I studied Korean history but never art history. I sit and wonder about re-reading Girl with a Pearl Earring to get a sense of writing about art in English, as literary translation is akin to writing a novel in many ways. And I start researching books in English on traditional Korean art to get a better sense of writing specifically about traditional Korean art in English.

I’ve translated several pages since, but about 50 to 80 percent of every page is full of highlights that I need to come back to later on. Completing the first draft is going to be hard and challenging, but it’s also my favorite part in the entire translation process—where everything is new and exciting and I’m still trying to make sense of the world that is unfolding before me.

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Hannah’s Translation Diary #1: The Rewards of Keeping a Translation Diary

The Rewards of Keeping a Translation Diary

By Hannah Pang

The idea of keeping a translation diary first took root in my mind when I came across Daniel Hahn’s translation diary on Charco Press’s blog in January this year. Hahn is a British writer, editor and translator (Portuguese, Spanish and French). Upon more Googling, I discovered he had first begun blogging about his translation in 2013, and he wasn’t the only translator to do that. Kathryn Hemmann, translator of Japanese literature, did the same in 2015. As I studied their diary entries, I pondered what motivated them to, in Hahn’s words, “make things more difficult for himself”, spending additional time writing and reflecting on the translation process, outside of the gruelling act of translation itself. Is there a lesson or two for younger translators like myself and for readers of translated literature?

Michael Williams, in an article for The Guardian last November, wrote that the publication of Australian writer Helen Garner’s diaries made “such a pleasurable, significant cultural contribution”. I believe the same is true of translation diaries. Translation has always been an imperceptible unit of literary culture, though this is slowly changing as more small presses advocate for translated literature and more literary translators use social media as a conduit to share snippets of their translation processes and thoughts. It’s fascinating to also observe the evolution of translators between their first and most recent posts, as Williams put it, “as a kind of preserved present”.

Translation diaries also take readers behind the scenes to look more closely at the inherent traits of an author or a language, translation processes, and linguistic calculations translators make to render a translation accurate and readable in the target language. If not for Hahn’s diary, I wouldn’t have learned that adjectives follow their nouns in Spanish language ([the man] tall, [the shirt] white), much like the Malay language. Or that one of the writing traits of Chilean writer Diamela Eltit, author of the book he’s now translating, is the use of multiple adjectives, the effect of which he has to ensure adheres to the rules of the English language. In Kathryn’s translation diary, she had recorded how much she paid for copy editing and illustrations and listed her plans for the following month like a sticky note to herself.

I invite you to join Stella, Lizzie and I as we embark on our journaling journey chronicling our translations of Korean fiction novels: Volume 1 and 2 of Jung-myung Lee’s Painter of the Wind and Seo Su-jin’s Korean Teachers. I hope our reflections will help to lift the veneer of inexplicability and throw some light on what translation involves, and along the way galvanise more readers into reading translated literature.

References:
https://charcopress.com/dannys-translation-diary
https://japaneselit.net/2015/02/01/translation-diary-part-two/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/nov/03/guardian-australia-book-club-join-helen-garner-to-talk-about-writing-life-and-releasing-her-diaries

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