Deborah Smith, a creative translator, won the Man Booker International Prize in 2016 for her English translation of the Korean author Han Kang’s novel, The Vegetarian. Smith’s translation was revolutionary and divergent in the translation field, enhancing its global significance. Despite winning a prize, it was not respected or esteemed by some South Korean translators, writers, and academics. This introduced the dimensional aspect of Smith’s translation.
The mistranslations were the main focus of discussions in South Korea. Critics, including Kim, Jeong, and Jo, were concerned about the quality and value of the outcome, as it went against the social and communal norms of South Korea. The translation was seen as a betrayal of Korean national literary translation.
This is how Smith’s and Kang’s story began. I felt like a judge at a case hearing, surprised by the various outlooks on this topic. Initially, I wondered how a translator could alter words and phrases and distort the author’s intended message. However, that is not what Smith did. Critics have a narrow-minded view of this translation, focusing only on the alterations made by Smith. Evaluating this translation solely on fidelity and accuracy makes it seem unsuccessful.
What is accuracy? What is faithfulness? What is fidelity? These key points do not bear the same meaning for everyone. While translation for sense rather than word-for-word means unfaithfulness for critics like Kim, who calls this translation a catastrophe, word-for-word fidelity does not equate to accuracy or faithfulness for Smith.
Smith approaches the Korean source text from a feminist perspective. She preserves and emphasizes the feminist elements, while Kang’s source text reflects the patriarchal quality of Korean society. As Bassnett states, “Translation is a creative literary activity and translators are no less than recreators of the text in a new language.” Translation, particularly literary translation, cannot simply be a mechanical process but must be a creative one. Smith aims to produce great English literature, considering her English-speaking audience. Providing the intended message of the author within different words and phrases creates a new text, as the source and target text audiences are different.
Smith highlights that “Faithfulness is an outmoded, misleading, and unhelpful concept when it comes to translation. ... The translation which is most faithful to the original in terms of word choice, syntax, etc., is highly unlikely to be sufficiently faithful to the experience of its original reading public. ... Translating is not an issue of language only: it is much more about literary sensibility than it is about knowing what a given word means in another language. There are dictionaries for that.” Adapting the language for the target readers and making sense in the target text is Smith’s main objective.
As a self-conscious translator, Smith chose a female author whose work already had feminist elements. She did not distort the message and elements of the source text. Smith captures some of these patriarchal moments and accentuates them as significant elements in order to strengthen the feminist dimension of the Korean original. To sum up, readers should evaluate Smith’s translation as a whole. Comparing the source and target texts word by word to see if Smith translated them literally would be narrow-minded and biased. Smith used different words and phrases to create the same effect present in the source text in the target text. Han Kang’s novel has patriarchal elements to indicate the oppression women experience, and in Smith’s translation, these elements are present alongside feminist ones. South Koreans can grasp the minor details of the language used, such as subliminal messages conveyed via elements or characters in the novel. On the other hand, English-speaking audiences may not comprehend the novel with the same sense of patriarchal superiority if the novel is translated word by word. Smith successfully provided the intended message by introducing a new dimension of the novel to the target readers.
Ece Celikkol
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