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lauradi7dwAt the recommendation of a friend, I started reading "Mater 2-10" by Hwang Sok-yong, translated from Korean by Sora Kim-Russell and Youngjae Josephine Bae. (note that the surname of the Korean author is first, and the surnames of the translators are last). I can hardly finish short books these days, much less one that is 400+ pages. I guess that isn't a lot of pages for a family saga that covers over a hundred years of Korean history, up to the present, but it's a lot for reading while I'm on the bus.
I did carefully read the translators' note in the front and was struck by the care that they took to explain why some Korean words and names were retained. They say that they started out simplifying things to make it easy for the English reader. Then:
"But it was somewhere around when characters were forced to change their names and conform to Japanese ways that the hidden violence of translation became more apparent. If a story is not just about the survival of a nation but the survival of the common people of that nation, the ones most often trod upon, then what does it mean for translation to erase the markers of that nation's culture, of those people's identities? When a novel's characters are ordered by their Japanese bosses to change their names on the spot because Korean is too difficult to pronounce, what is the English translator's duty?
To that end, we looked for ways to decolonise (sic) our translation."
It goes on, but that was what struck me hardest. And then almost ridiculously, I remembered my outrage that Scholastic books edited the early Harry Potter books for American audiences, removing expressions like "bubble and squeak," justifying their actions by saying that having to figure out what something meant would spoil the flow of reading for kids. Harrumph.
Now I'm thinking of the prologue to the musical "Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812" which has the line "It's a complicated Russian novel, everyone's got nine different names," and thinking that probably no translator has tried to simplify names in "War and Peace." (another DNF for me).
PS I know almost no Korean, but some of the words they left in are ones that I know, although context would let one understand anyway.
I did carefully read the translators' note in the front and was struck by the care that they took to explain why some Korean words and names were retained. They say that they started out simplifying things to make it easy for the English reader. Then:
"But it was somewhere around when characters were forced to change their names and conform to Japanese ways that the hidden violence of translation became more apparent. If a story is not just about the survival of a nation but the survival of the common people of that nation, the ones most often trod upon, then what does it mean for translation to erase the markers of that nation's culture, of those people's identities? When a novel's characters are ordered by their Japanese bosses to change their names on the spot because Korean is too difficult to pronounce, what is the English translator's duty?
To that end, we looked for ways to decolonise (sic) our translation."
It goes on, but that was what struck me hardest. And then almost ridiculously, I remembered my outrage that Scholastic books edited the early Harry Potter books for American audiences, removing expressions like "bubble and squeak," justifying their actions by saying that having to figure out what something meant would spoil the flow of reading for kids. Harrumph.
Now I'm thinking of the prologue to the musical "Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812" which has the line "It's a complicated Russian novel, everyone's got nine different names," and thinking that probably no translator has tried to simplify names in "War and Peace." (another DNF for me).
PS I know almost no Korean, but some of the words they left in are ones that I know, although context would let one understand anyway.
