In the last two decades of cultural export boom from South Korea, Korean literature has experienced an unprecedented level of exposure on the world stage, crowned by such wins as the Man Booker International Prize for The Vegetarian (Han Kang, 2007) and the global popularity of Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 (Cho Nam-Joo, 2016). In the interlingual and transcultural literary interactions that have come to form a “Korean Wave of literature,” translation has come to function as a profound “shaping force” as pointed out by Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere. Indeed, translators have made it possible to embrace translation both as a craft and “a selling point,” as translator Deborah Smith noted. One of the drivers of Korea’s dramatic rise as a “cultural superpower” in the field of literary translation are translation institutes and government-supported grants for translations. Their support of translators, unique in today’s global landscape, has transformed the working conditions of translation. Translation academies, international writers’ festivals, and publishing grants are among the diverse government-funded activities.

This session explores the relationship between institutionalized translation and the rapidly transforming field of literary translation. Translation is no longer perceived as an invisible act that is solely interested in finding equivalences that reinforce existing conditions of exchange and static forms of knowledge. Rather, translation is increasingly thought of as a process that carries within it the radical potential to be transformative on both ends of the source and target languages and/or cultures. In this session, we bring together some of the most active translators in Korean literature today to engage with the following questions: what are the conditions of exchange in which the cultural knowledge of Korea is translated? In what ways does translation enable new possibilities of encounter between languages and cultures? How has the institutionalization of translation facilitated or hindered the conditions within which we engage with translation as theoretical reckoning and practical work? How does translation help us problematize the national boundaries and identity-related postures (race, gender, and class) that impact the representation of minorities, and allow us the opportunity to think anew about the ethics of difference involved in such representation? In the first paper, Victoria Caudle discusses how the “soft power” of translation into foreign languages can potentially disrupt the traditionalism in the South Korean literary establishment and pave new grounds of visibility for queer texts through her own translation of Dolki Min’s Walking Practice (2022). In the second paper, Sophie Bowman engages with recent interviews and essays by literary translators to illuminate upon the critical intervention they bring through their practice with respect to the familiar oppositional metaphorics of translation (i.e., original vs. derivative, fidelity vs. freedom). Such oppositional views of translation are also taken to task in the third paper, in which Steven Capener examines Korean to English language translations as competing grounds for politics and pragmatics of translation. Drawing from his pedagogical experience in teaching Korean to English translation, Capener suggests the task of the translator as a mediator that facilitates communication among various interlingual signals and intercultural contexts. Finally, in the fourth paper, Kiin Chong, Joo Young Lee, and Daeho Lee engage in a comparative reading of Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko (2017) with its Korean and Japanese translations to explore the peculiar ways through which each translation attempts to “discover” and render a different sense of cultural authenticity to the story of a Korean diasporic family in Japan and the U.S. in the English original.

Each presentation will be allotted fifteen minutes, which will allow the panelists to engage in an open discussion and Q&A with the audience. Given the ongoing explosive popularity of Korean literature in translation, this session will offer a timely platform for active literary translators to engage in a candid discussion on translation at the nexus of theory and praxis, as well as translation as a craft both enabled and conditioned by government sponsorship and institutionalization at the state level.