Her translation of Gine Cornelia Pedersen’s Zero was nominated for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Award in 2019, and her work on Agnes Ravatn’s The Bird Tribunal won an English PEN Translates Award in 2016. Ravatn’s novel was later selected for BBC Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime, and was shortlisted for the 2017 Petrona Award for Best Scandinavian Crime Novel of the Year.

What made you want to be a translator and how did you get started?

I’ve always been a big reader and started university on an English Literature and French degree, but there was such a heavy focus on so-called classics and very little diversity or contemporary writing, and I remember feeling disappointed – I had expected university to be the place that would open my mind to new writing and perspectives and actually the opposite seemed to be true, in a lot of ways.

I took Norwegian as an elective third subject because I thought it would be fun to learn a language I knew nothing about, and it was a revelation – the classes were small, the tutors were brilliant and the curriculum was so varied. I switched to Scandinavian Studies and never looked back.

We were offered a course in translation from the Scandinavian languages taught by translator Kari Dickson, and we tackled a joyous range of texts. I loved it, and Kari was instrumental in helping me to find my way into translation as a career.

Read More: Essential Norwegian Novels

What are some of the challenges when translating Norwegian?

English translations of Norwegian tend to be around 10-15% longer, so there’s a certain snappiness that comes with Norwegian that it is sometimes hard to replicate in English with the same effect. I was painfully aware of this when working on Gine Cornelia Pedersen’s novel Zero for Nordisk Books – the narrator’s voice just zings in the original, it’s snappy and soulful and the sentences themselves are so concise and filled with power, it pained me whenever the English version was longer, even if it was unavoidable!

I spent a lot of time re-reading the text aloud during the editing phase in every attempt to maintain the rhythm, even if that meant it had to be slightly reimagined in English.

The translation was longlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize, which was a huge surprise and a very humbling experience, but my favourite part of the whole ceremony was hearing all of the translations read aloud – Simon Park, who chaired the award panel, read an extract of Zero and it was amazing, he breathed such life into the text.

As translators I sometimes think we become consumed with the problematic elements of the work, the knotty little puns and never-ending sentences that plague us, we can struggle to see beyond them, but hearing someone read a text we’ve laboured over is such a privilege, and this one was just fun. I mean, the book as a whole has some heavy themes, but there was humour there that I had virtually forgotten about. Taking a step back and trying to see the work with fresh eyes can be a challenge when translating anything.

How many languages do you speak and what made you learn them?

I speak Norwegian and can understand Swedish and Danish – I tend not to work with the latter two, but I’ve lived in all three Scandinavian countries for different periods of time. I studied French for quite a few years and have a passive understanding even if I trip myself up when I ever try to speak it nowadays. I take my toddler to a local French playgroup, and learning nursery rhymes and playing games has been a fun way to tap into those buried language skills.

What’s next for you? 

I’m currently working on a sample extract of Agnes Ravatn’s forthcoming novel, The Seven Doors – I translated Ravatn’s first novel in English, The Bird Tribunal, and I think she’s a brilliant writer and thinker, so translating more of her fiction has been a delight.

I’m really hopeful that it will be picked up for English publication. Publishing translations in English is often a big risk for publishers – even with the support of grants, which the Norwegians are great at providing, it costs a lot of money. It’s disheartening when you have a piece of work in mind for translation and you know the costs will be prohibitive for any publisher you might be able to persuade of its brilliance.

What advice would you give someone who wants to become a translator?

Some of the best advice I’ve had has been from Don Bartlett, who mentored me as part of my BCLT mentorship. He gave me plenty of practical guidance in terms of the act of translation itself, but he was refreshingly transparent about translation as a career too – making a living in translation can be very difficult, for example, and he advised me early on to do as much translation as I could alongside other work before dropping my hours elsewhere or attempting to switch to full-time translation.

I taught in a university until 2017 and was only able to take on more translation after that contract came to an end, but for years I was balancing 24-37 hours a week at the university, then translating whenever I could squeeze it in. It was hard, but it meant that I wasn’t able to take on more projects than I could reasonably complete in the time available to me, and I feel like that focus on my translation projects at the time really helped me to hone my skills and take a measured approach.

More than anything, though, I would suggest getting to know other translators, both those working with your own language pair, and those working from different languages altogether. There is a world of support and kindness there, and a lot of practical assistance when a particular work or phrase eludes you.

What are you reading right now?

I’ve been reading Not One Day by Anna Garréta (Deep Vellum) – Garréta’s work is fascinating and I bow to Emma Ramadan’s translation genius after reading her translation of Sphinx. Not One Day is doing nothing to change my mind about that.

I’m reading a few Norwegian novels at the moment too – I wish I had the luxury of focusing on one at a time, but the Norwegians take weeks and weeks of holiday in the summer and have a tendency to assign a shedload of work before making for their idyllic mountain retreats (bitter, me?!), so I’m working my way through a pile of reading and translation ready for their return and a busy autumn of book fairs, including Frankfurt, where Norway is set to be Guest of Honour.

If you want to read more translator interviews, check out our recent interview with beloved Korean-English translator Sora Kim-Russell.

Her forthcoming translations include The Law of Lines (a working title) by Pyun Hye-young; On the Origin of Species and Other Stories, by Boyoung Kim, which she is co-translating with Joungmin Lee Comfort; and The Prisoner, an autobiography by Hwang Sok-yong, which she is co-translating with Anton Hur. Her full list of publications can be found at sorakimrussell.com.

What made you want to be a translator, and how did you get started?

I don’t have a very exciting origin story. I started out as a poet and aspiring fiction writer, so at the outset, it was mostly me attempting to reverse engineer fiction writing. I thought that if I translated enough stories—i.e. take them apart and put them back together again in another language—then I would learn how to write my own.

But translation ended up taking over, and now the most I manage of my own writing is the occasional essay. One of these days, maybe, I’ll figure out how to divide my energy well enough to do both.

Do you find any unique challenges with translating the Korean language?

This isn’t specific to the language itself, but one thing that can be challenging is the relative lack of developmental editing in Korean publishing, i.e. where an editor gives the writer feedback on plot development, character development, voice, pacing, and so on.

From what I’ve been told, most literary editing in Korea is limited to copyediting. When books are sold to US publishers, some editors will edit the book the same as if it were written in English, which can catch writers off guard, especially considering it’s usually a book they finished years before and weren’t prepared to have to dive back into.

It can also mean more work for the translator, who would not only have to retranslate those edits but also help with the negotiation between writer and editor. For those reasons and more, a lot of translators wrestle with how much developmental editing to do on our own as we translate, but it’s a bit of a slippery slope. It’s easy to get carried away with your own vision of the book and end up undoing the right choices that the author made in the first place.

What is your methodology? How do you approach translating a novel?

I’m probably no different from other translators when it comes to method. I try my best to capture the writer’s voice and to not ruin what made the book worth reading in the first place. For some writers, I might focus more on creating a fluid, storytelling voice, while others might demand more attention to symbolism and word play. It’s all fairly subjective though—reading is such a private experience, but as translators we end up making ours public.

This might be a bit of a tangent, but I think that readers have no idea just how many choices and how much strategy goes into a translation. Readers and reviewers alike enjoy nitpicking our work—we’re always either “too faithful” or “too unfaithful” for their liking (as if those are our only two choices).

For the most part, they don’t know what sort of decisions you made regarding the overall balance and tone of the text, let alone how the book was edited by the publisher. The latter point seems to surprise people the most—the general impression seems to be that translators work entirely alone and that every choice is ours, from the cover art to the final word of the novel, and that’s simply not how it works.

What has been your favourite book to translate so far, and why?

I was going to make a joke about picking a favorite child, but in all honesty, whatever book I’m translating at the moment becomes my favorite. Each book presents its own joys and challenges and teaches me something new about how to translate. So I really can’t pick one. It’d be easier to enumerate what charmed me about each book.

What are you reading right now?

Mostly online articles about how to get a baby to sleep longer.

What advice would you give someone who wants to become a translator?

Read. Read widely. Read out loud. Attend poetry and prose readings, especially by writers who know how to perform their work. If you want the words to jump off the page, then you have to understand the aural side of writing. But don’t ignore the page either.

Pay attention to what writers do. Writing and translation are physical—it’s not just about capturing some ephemeral spirit of a text, it’s about the arrangement of words on a page and the way those words sound when spoken aloud.

Also, learn the business of publishing. It’s not enough to be an artist, you also have to know how to read a contract, negotiate for yourself, work around deadlines that are not always announced ahead of time, and live on a budget with payments that do not arrive at scheduled intervals.

And finally, understand that becoming a translator is a learning process. I think there’s a fair number of us who jump into translation having experienced some success with language acquisition or with our own writing and therefore think that we already know how to translate. Or that we’re going to be creative in ways that others haven’t been. But then that first bit of criticism comes along and knocks us back.

I’ve seen this happen with my students, and I’m sure I did the same thing when I was starting out. Our ego takes a blow, and we question whether we’re really cut out for this work. But as painful as that can be, what we hopefully gain from it is the understanding that literary translation is a specific skill set of its own that is learned, developed, and refined over time through practice and feedback.

Thanks for reading! If you’re a translator and you’re interested in being interviewed by us, please feel free to reach out! 

You can also read some of our other translator interviews here.

What made you want to be a translator and how did you get started?

I never actually set out to become a translator. It never even occurred to me that one could do it as a profession. But I loved books and I’ve always wanted to become a writer. When I was in my third year of university, I decided to take a Korean language course for an easy elective, but also because I wanted to get a taste of Korean literature, which I knew nothing about, despite my heritage.

The course was taught by a brilliant professor who had decided to teach Korean by getting his students to read a sampling of modern Korean short stories. As the end-of-term project, we each had to translate a never-before translated Korean story into English. The story the professor gave me to translate was insufferably tedious and difficult—I don’t recall the title or what it was about.

At the time, my mother was reading a new collection of short stories by a Korean writer who had debuted a few years earlier. She praised one story in particular and recommended that I try translating it instead.

This was Ha Seong-nan’s “The Woman Next Door” from Flowers of Mold. (I should note that Flowers of Mold was originally published in Korean as The Woman Next Door, but the editors at Open Letter and I wanted to set it apart from several other books with the same title, and decided that the award-winning “Flowers of Mold” would serve well as the title of the entire collection.)

When I handed in my translation of “The Woman Next Door,” my professor urged me to submit it to the 2001 Korea Times translation contest, and to my shock, I ended up receiving the grand prize, which equalled about $5000 USD, an absolute windfall to me at the time. After that, I was roped into graduate seminars and translation workshops, and actively encouraged to pursue translation.

I don’t want to spout such a cliché, but if I hadn’t had the good fortune of meeting such nurturing teachers who saw something in me and were kind enough to nudge me in the right direction, there’s no way I’d be doing this today.

How do you choose the work that you translate?

Sometimes, LTI Korea will send me a story and ask me to translate it, and if I end up falling in love with it, I’ll inquire about the author’s other work. If a certain blurb catches my eye on social media and it’s not attached to a translator, I may look into it as well.

Korean publishers, English-language publishers, and literary agents have contacted me to see if I might be interested in translating their upcoming books, and I’ve also gotten recommendations from the authors I already translate. In the case of feminist author Kim Yi-seol, it was completely serendipitous. I randomly took a book off a shelf at my mother’s house and brought it home with me.

When I started reading the opening story about a young homeless girl who comes of age while living at a train station, I felt as if I were being kicked in the stomach, and the need to translate the book took a hold of me.

I did some research on Kim, ordered all her books, reached out to her various publishers, and in the end managed to get in touch with her. In other words, I totally stalked her. Though she debuted in 2006, published two short story collections and three novels (one of which has been translated into French and German), and has either won or been shortlisted for several major literary awards in Korea, none of her works had been translated into English.

I’m sure you can tell by now, but I like to sense a deep kinship with the work I translate, because devotion for the work shows in the translation. Passion is really hard to fake.

By the way, when I recently mentioned Kim Yi-seol’s book to my mother, she had no idea what I was talking about. She claimed she had never even laid eyes on the book, let alone read it. We concluded it could only belong to my uncle, who’d lived briefly with my mother years ago. Strange, since it’s not the kind of books he reads. I still marvel at how I came across Kim Yi-seol’s work. I guess it was just meant to be. 

What unique challenges come with translating graphic novels?

It’s challenging to try to match the English word count to the original language word count, since the space in a graphic novel is so limited. But it’s good practice, because I’m finding more economical ways of saying things. Capturing the voice of the characters can be difficult as well, since dialogue in a graphic novel is especially important, but again, I find that this only hones my skills as a writer and translator.

I struggled a bit with the dialogue of Bad Friends, since the characters’ speech and choice of vocabulary are pretty far removed from my own, and I needed it to sound terse, raw, edgy, and fresh, without being trite or unnatural, or like I was trying too hard. I spent many nights in front of my computer, looking up the latest swear words and trying them out, hissing certain lines under my breath…

Though it’s getting easier, I’m still finding it difficult to translate sound effects. Many Korean words are based on onomatopoeia. For example, there are nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs that describe every possible sound, as well as textures and sensations, so I’ll often get stuck on a single word that describes, say, the sudden manner in which a character jumps to his feet or bursts into a room. It can be maddening.

What about your job do you find most satisfying and most frustrating?

 Nothing beats the feeling of finishing the initial edits on a first draft, when it’s no longer an incoherent mess, but an actual story where you can start to see the beauty that had stunned you in the original, which had made you want to translate it in the first place.

I also consider it a great honour to “unveil” a glorious piece of writing to the Anglophone world in its new form. I guess I’m like that with other things, too, whether it’s food, music, or movies; if I love something, I’ll tell everyone about it.

But what I find myself treasuring more and more about my job is the relationship I have with my authors. As a translator, I have a very intense relationship with the author’s work, so when I get to know the author as a person, it’s pure bonus; it satisfies the inner fan in me, while deepening my understanding of the work itself.

Since I live in Canada and they in Korea, we keep in touch via email, instant messenger, and Skype, send each other books and gifts, and when I visit Korea, we go out for dinner and drinks. I know this doesn’t come as an automatic perk of being a translator, so I feel incredibly lucky.

The most frustrating aspect about my job is the endless hustle. I’ve said before that as a literary translator in today’s world, it’s not enough to just translate. You have to take on a proactive role, actively connecting with those in publishing to hustle the work yourself, which does overlap a little with what I love about the job.

I guess if the hustle is successful, it’s immensely gratifying, but if all that work leads to nothing, it can be quite demoralizing. For example, I’m usually the one submitting to magazines, and for my authors who don’t have agents, I’m also the one pitching to editors/publishers. This requires an entirely different skill set from translating, and the constant wearing of different hats can get exhausting.

Plus, my working hours are already limited, since I have two young children, which means that sometimes I’ll work on a cover letter to an editor and have to call it a day. That’s why it’s difficult to translate and promote something unless you’re absolutely passionate about it.

What are you excited about or working on now?

 I’m translating Kim Yi-seol’s dark, transgressive work right now, and I’m happy to tell you that “Thirteen”—the story about the homeless girl who lives at a train station—will be appearing in Guernica in a few months.

I’m also translating the work of feminist author Kang Young-sook, whom I met on my most recent trip to Korea through Ha Seong-nan. Kang writes about the female grotesque, delving into urban noir, fantasy, and climate fiction, and she’s also one of Ha’s closest friends. I can’t wait to share Kang’s eerie award-winning story that takes foot-and-mouth disease as its subject, which will be published in the next issue of The White Review.

What are you reading right now?

I’m currently re-reading Mariana Enriquez’s Things We Lost in the Fire, translated by the brilliant Megan McDowell. With each new read, I grow more in awe of both the author and translator. The book is absolutely terrifying, but it’s become one of my favourite short story collections of all time. I’m also reading Sharlene Teo’s Ponti. I especially love the voice of sixteen-year-old Szu. 

Read our review of Ponti.

What is your favourite style or genre of fiction?

Literary fiction. Short stories, especially linked short stories. Coming-of-age stories with precocious narrators. Work that’s dark, imaginative, and intense, but not outright horror, work that makes me cry, and will continue to stay in my mind long after I’ve closed the book.

We caught up with him to find out about his translation process and his upcoming translation of Demons by Kang Hwa-gil – part of the new Yeoyu series from Strangers Press.

What made you want to be a translator and how did you get started?

That’s a funny story. Initially, I was positive that I was meant to be the next world champion in taekwondo poomsae.

Aged 17, I left my home to train under a famous grandmaster in Suwon, South Korea. I’ve always been a firm believer in hard work over everything, but, as time went by, I came to realise that talent is not exactly a myth, as my Korean peers were miles ahead of me just by virtue of their physique. (And yes, on top of that, they had been drilled since age -10).

Only then I started to wonder if I, too, had something that I was inherently good at. I sort of knew I had a way with languages, but my time in Korea provided me with the necessary ‘proof’: whilst my taekwondo instructors weren’t so impressed with my kicks and punches, they were truly taken aback by how quickly I picked up Korean.

Sometimes we would abandon the drill at hand altogether and go over some grammar patterns instead. The sheer joy I got out of ‘languaging’ made me want to translate for a living.

What were the challenges when translating your latest work by Kang Hwa-gil?

Head and shoulders above the rest: the title. The single-word original title (손) refers to evil folklore spirits who interfere with people’s day-to-day lives. Most Korean removal companies, for example, have a calendar on their website showing when these ghosts are purportedly ‘active’ and when the coast is clear, so that whoever believes in their existence may plan accordingly.

I toyed with all kinds of phantoms but none of them are completely accurate and all of them have other, mostly unwanted connotations.

Of course, transliterating the Korean would be an option in this kind of situation, had it not resulted in a word that would give the reader a completely different idea of what the story is about: Son. Not even the ‘old’ romanisation system could be of help by suggesting a different spelling or at least a diacritic to distinguish it from the English.

In the end, I decided that Demons did most of the work, whilst also alluding to the English expression ‘fight one’s own demons’, which neatly fits in with the protagonist’s qualms.

How many languages do you speak and what made you learn them?

5 living languages and 3 dead ones (though ‘speaking’ is not the right term for the latter category). I grew up in Amsterdam, speaking Dutch and learning English, French and German in that order.

All of those languages are compulsory in high school, up to a certain level; I guess we like being able to talk with our neighbours. The language freak I was, I also took both Latin and ancient Greek by choice (translation galore!), and grew so fond of Horace and Homer that I decided to pursue a degree in Classics.

My understanding of Korean originates in being surrounded by Korean teammates 24/7 and figuring out what body part they told me to move by this word or that. After my return from Korea, I began studying the language formally, setting out on a learning curve that would culminate in a master’s in Korean Studies at Oxford.

There, I added a final mark to the tally by taking a course in classical Chinese. It’s absolutely fascinating to witness the interplay between all these different languages in my own head.

What are the best and worst parts about translating literature?

Let’s start with the bad news: translation is still an undervalued enterprise. Both in monetary terms and in recognition. It’s definitely on the up, but most friends still declare me a fool for wanting to embark on this career, and I don’t blame them.

For me, however, the downsides far from outweigh the blessings of the job: the euphoria when you dig up exactly the right phrase from the depths of your mind, the pleasure in knowing that you are introducing a number of people to new and exciting literature they would otherwise never have come into contact with, and obviously bickering with fellow translators about the minuscule difference between two synonyms (honestly though, I think translators are the most warm-hearted people in the world!).

What’s next for you?

I’m quite set on moving back to Korea soon. I’ve learned a lot reading and studying lots of literature from afar, but right now I feel I need to fully immerse myself again. And I miss noraebang nights. A lot. I’ve been working on a few things behind the scenes, so hopefully, some of those will come to fruition before I go and I can keep myself alive.

What advice would you give someone who wants to become a translator?

Summer schools, mentorships, symposiums: apply for and go attend them all. I can’t even begin to describe how much help I’ve received from the people I met on such occasions.

The Emerging Translators Mentorship from the National Centre for Writing stands out for me personally, but even if your language isn’t offered, simply being able to have a chat with other translators who have been or are currently going through a similar process as you, is key. And above all, it makes the job all the more fun taking part in this kind of ‘tribe’ that us translators have apparently formed (to quote Danny Hahn).

What are you reading right now?

Endless Blue Sky by Lee Hyoseok, which is the next book for discussion at KCC’s Korean Literature Night, where I’ll be moderating.

Given my background, I’m perfectly liable to derail the conversation into a rant about the translator’s every choice, whether good or bad, but luckily the novel is also very interesting historically as well as formally, so there’ll be lots to talk about.

Plus, I always love hearing others’ experiences of a book; I wish I could assemble an impromptu book club for every book I read. (Or maybe a blog like yours would work too, ha!).

We did actually review Endless Blue Sky for anyone who’s curious about this excellent book!

You can follow Mattho on Twitter. For more like this read our other translator interviews.

Her translations of Sergius Seeks Bacchus  were awarded the 2017 PEN Presents prize and the 2018 PEN Translates prize. Check out our Tiffany Tsao interview to find out more about her and how she got her start in the world of translation for our Meet the Translator series.

What made you want to be a translator and how did you get started?

I was getting increasingly frustrated with translations of Indonesian literature I was reading. I often felt they were too literal, or didn’t do a sufficient job of replicating the feel or natural flow of the original. I was also conceited enough to wonder whether I could do any better. So I began to try.

My first translation attempts began shortly after I joined Asymptote’s volunteer staff as their Indonesia Editor-at-Large. Part of my job was to submit suggestions for new Indonesian writers to feature in their issues and blog.

Because Asymptote only publishes work that has never been translated, I found myself creating sample translations excerpted from the particular stories or poems that I wanted to show the section editors. I was happy enough with the results that I wanted to keep going.

What were the challenges when translating Norman Erikson Pasaribu’s poetry collection Sergius Seeks Bacchus?

Because I write novels, I tend to think in prose. (I’m too prosaic, you might say.) Hence it was crucial to have Norman himself involved in the process, making suggestions, offering critique, providing background, rewriting the original Indonesian versions, sometimes recording him reading the poem so I could get a better feel.

Sergius Seeks Bacchus was a learning experience for me: in honing my sense of rhythm, learning to be more thrifty and at the same time more imaginative with words. I’ve carried these lessons into my fiction-writing, for better or for worse.

When I was revising the drafts of my latest novel Under Your Wings, I ended up rewriting huge swathes to improve the rhythm of the sentences. Translating some poems came more easily to me. The humorous ones like “Update on the Left-Behind Woman” and “Termination Letter” were almost effortless.

Norman and I have similar senses of humor. But “Finding Leo” was immensely difficult, even though it’s one of the shortest ones! It took me months to figure out a version of the last two lines that Norman and I were happy with.  

Read our review of Sergius Seeks Bacchus

How many languages do you speak and what made you learn them?

I speak English fluently and Indonesian reasonably. (Ironically, the more my Indonesian improves, the more convinced I am that I’m not very good.) I speak Mandarin poorly, and more poorly every year that passes. I once had rudimentary Italian skills, and pretty much don’t anymore.

English, I grew up speaking. Indonesian I grew up hearing and speaking occasionally, but I made the effort to improve it when I was getting a PhD in English at UC-Berkeley. I wanted to better connect with my heritage (my parents are both Chinese-Indonesian) and so I began to read Indonesian fiction.

My parents wanted me to learn Mandarin because we’re ethnic Chinese, but after I began getting serious about Indonesian, I let my Mandarin slide. My brain could only take learning one language at a time.

I began learning Italian because I thought I would love reading Dante. But after taking a class on Dante where I read the Divine Comedy in translation, I discovered I wasn’t wild enough about it to keep studying Italian after all. I know that’s literary blasphemy. I’m sorry!

Do you feel pressure to represent Indonesia with your translations?

Emphatically not. And I worry about this expectation: that literature we publish or translate from a certain country should somehow capture the essence of that country. Places are so diverse. People are so diverse. Writing is so diverse.

I think the Indonesian works I translate will inherently convey something about Indonesia to reader simply by virtue of being Indonesian. But whether they, alone or collectively, could ever “represent” one of the most diverse countries in the world. I don’t think so. It would be impossible.

In fact, I feel that aspiring to be representative might actually be harmful. Whenever something or someone claims to be representative, it usually means that other things and ones are being marginalized or excluded.

What’s next for you?

Translation-wise, my next two projects are a short-story collection by Norman Erikson Pasaribu (the Indonesian title is Hanya Kamu Yang Tahu Berapa Lama Lagi Aku Harus Tunggu, or Only You Know How Much Longer I Must Wait) and a novel by Dee Lestari (the Indonesian title is Aroma Karsa).

Writing-wise, my next two projects are the third novel of my Oddfits series (the working title is The Sprung Histories) and another novel that has a cool dystopianish premise which I’ll remain vague about because I don’t want someone else to steal my brilliant idea (yeah right).

What advice would you give someone who wants to become a translator?

If you can, translate people who trust and respect you and whom you trust and respect. I say “if you can” because I know not everyone is in a position to choose—or even to know whom they trust and respect. That plus sometimes authors are dead and thus unlike to be very good at corresponding or answering queries.

But seriously, an author-translator relationship built on mutual respect and trust makes the process so joyful.

What are you reading right now?

I’m reading Gravity and Grace by the Christian activist, mystic, and philosopher Simone Weil. Norman highly recommended it and gave it to me as a present during our recent UK tour for Sergius Seeks Bacchus. Despite how well my professional life has been going, my inner life has been rather tumultuous these past few years. I’m finding the book mesmerizing. On the one hand, it is nourishing, on the other hand, it’s very severe.

Here’s a snippet: “Grace fills empty spaces but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void.” In other news, I’m also reading the Translating Feminisms chapbook series published recently by Tilted Axis Press, and Sour Heart by Jenny Zhang!

If you enjoyed this Tiffany Tsao interview, find out more about her translations on our post showcasing some of our favourite Indonesian writers.

She recently completed her translations of Duanwad Pimwana’s story collection Arid Dreams (Feminist Press) and novel Bright (Two Lines Press), both forthcoming in April 2019. A native of Bangkok who spent two decades in the U.S., she now lives in Berlin, Germany. You can follow her on Twitter here.

What made you want to be a translator and how did you get started?

I’m actually a career switcher—I used to be a lawyer before I went back to do my M.A. in translation at the American University of Paris (a program the university sadly no longer offers). My advisor there, Daniel Medin, encouraged me to submit a story from my thesis to Asymptote, and that’s how I got my first published translation.

I left the law not because I hated it, but it wasn’t something I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I’d studied literature as an undergrad, which I loved doing, and I thought, why not try translating Thai literature? There’s so little out there in English, and it would be a meaningful way for me to “return” to my native country and mother tongue. It all started sort of naively.

Do you feel pressure to represent Thailand with your translations?

Because so little Thai literature has been translated, yes, I do feel the pressure, even as I resist the idea—I don’t think any one book or author, or a small number of them, should be asked to speak or stand for a whole country. That pressure is why I hope many Thai voices emerge internationally, and why I’m so happy to be translating two very different authors, although I didn’t choose them for that reason.

I hope that the two of them—Prabda Yoon and Duanwad Pimwana—will already show some range in Thai writing and that the composite picture of Thailand that is formed will already be fuller.

But ultimately I am just one person with my own tastes and my own life story that surely must make me gravitate more easily toward certain books. The world of Prabda Yoon’s early stories, for example, feels like my world when I was growing up in Bangkok, and I’m far from immune from that nostalgia, especially because I haven’t really lived in Thailand since those days.

The Thailand of Duanwad Pimwana’s Bright—working class, on the eastern seaboard—isn’t familiar to me first hand, but I also feel close to this novel because it reminds me of my dad’s childhood stories. At the end of the day, I have to view my task modestly. Otherwise, I get paralyzed by the fear.

What are the best and worst parts of your job?

Best: meeting authors, the actual translation process, especially when you find a word or phrase that feels seamless, the high of getting a project picked up, and the thrill of holding a book you translated. My editor at Two Lines recently mailed me a galley of Bright, and I was giddy just holding that.

Worst: Even though I’ve been doing this for a few years now, I’m still getting used to being a freelancer, and the days—periods, really—when I’m less motivated come with so much guilt, which is only sometimes productive. When you work on your own, it’s hard to know if you’re ever doing enough.

What are you excited about or working on now?

I have two translations coming out in the spring— Arid Dreams, a story collection, and Bright, a novel, both by Duanwad Pimwana. They are being co-launched by the Feminist Press and Two Lines Press, which is amazing.

I believe that outside of academia Pimwana will, incredibly, be the first female Thai author to be published in English internationally, and, as Prabda Yoon mentioned in an interview, these works will be the first by a contemporary Thai author who writes in Thai to be “commercially” published in the U.S.

When I started these projects, these aspects weren’t at the forefront of my mind, and they’re just hitting me now. And speaking of range, these two books are really different. The novel is an episodic coming-of-age story that balances light and dark—the main story arc is sad but the little episodes are told with humour.

I personally love the structure of this novel for the story she wants to tell. Arid Dreams, on the other hand, is full of unsettling, social realist stories—her characters, never blameless, are psychologically worn down by the societal forces they have to contend with. A lot of the stories are real page-turners, too.

How many languages do you speak and what made you learn them?

My first language is Thai, and I left for school in the U.S. when I was twelve. I also have some level of French, Latin and German. My French is not nearly as good as it should be, especially now, but I studied French for a long time.

In college, I really loved reading French literature and theory. I actually started learning a little bit of French in fifth or sixth grade because my mom had a French teacher who was a French nun in her nineties, and when she didn’t feel like going to her lessons anymore, she sent me in her place to give her teacher some company.

Once upon a time, I could read Latin decently well, though not anymore, but I often think back to my time studying Latin, because the way the language is taught, it really gave me my first brush with translation. Lastly, I’m learning German because I live in Germany now.

What are you reading right now?

In English: I just started Deborah Levy’s Things I Don’t Want to Know after recently finishing The Cost of Living. I’m reading them out of order, I know, but I’d read an excerpt of the latter in The Guardian and really wanted to get to it.

There’s one passage from it that stayed with me, where she talks about this older man who has no awareness that a young woman he meets “might not consider herself to be the minor character and him the major character.” Not to turn Deborah Levy into a self-help book, but for me this is a really important perspective to keep in mind as you move through the world and interact with others. In general, though, I probably spend too much time reading The New Yorker.

In Thai: I’m reading Prabda Yoon’s essays and stories by Saneh Sangsuk (a.k.a. Danarun Saengthong), another literary heavyweight in Thailand.

Read through our Meet the Translator series to learn more about other amazing translators. If you’d like to be interviewed send us an email or a message on Twitter.

Follow Mui Poopoksakul on Twitter.

She also received the Tin House Scholarship for her novel Homesick, originally written in Spanish, forthcoming in English from Unnamed Press in September, and in Spanish from Entropía in 2020. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literary Studies from Northwestern University and an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa.

Visit Jennifer Croft on her website homesickbook.space or on Twitter.

What made you want to be a translator, and how did you get started?

I got started as a translator in college, at the University of Tulsa. Growing up in Tulsa, I was always interested in exploring other cultures, and because language had fascinated me since early childhood, the way I was able to do that before I was able to actually travel was through foreign language study.

I majored in Russian and English and minored in Creative Writing, and when I graduated, it seemed like the best way for me to combine those interests/skill sets was to try my hand at translation, so I enrolled in the MFA program in Literary Translation at the University of Iowa.

There is a unique relationship that gets forged in translation that has also proved really significant for me over time. I have a memoir coming out in September with Unnamed Press (entitled Homesick) that tries to get at this aspect a bit more. It’s a very dynamic form of empathy—of understanding the other—while also retaining my own voice.

Do you find any unique challenges with translating the Polish language?

Polish grammar permits it to be more compact than English; this is the case for most of the Slavic languages. I try to be mindful of that and be as succinct as possible, without altering the author’s style.

What are you excited about or working on now?

Right now I’m translating a short story collection by Argentine writer Federico Falco called A Perfect Cemetery, which is one of the most brilliant and beautiful things I’ve ever read, and I have a project at the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library to translate Olga Tokarczuk’s most recent novel, The Books of Jacob, a magnificent, thousand-page historical epic about the leader of a Jewish heretical sect. That’s pretty great, too.

As for my own projects, I’m working on a novel called Fidelity and a personal history of guns in the U.S.

How many languages do you speak, and what made you want to learn them?

Aside from Polish, Russian and Spanish, I’ve studied Croatian, French, German, Italian, Turkish and Ukrainian, but it’s hard—if not impossible—to maintain languages without coming into regular contact with them. I like to read in French and am hoping to do more with German soon.

What advice would you give someone who wants to become a translator?

I’m full of advice I may or may not follow myself. I think it’s important to live in the country you want to translate from. There are lots of little things you can’t get from afar. I think it’s important to read widely in your source language as well as your target language. I think, as with anything, there is never enough time to do as much due diligence as you would ideally do.

Lastly, I think it’s hard—but maybe not impossible—to earn a living in the United States as a freelance literary translator.

I rely on grants and fellowships and have been extremely lucky in the past year to also win some prize money; in the past I have had to borrow money from friends at various stages just to scrape by, and I suspect in the future I will have to get a “real” job.

What are you reading right now?

I just started Madhuri Vijay’s The Far Field, from Grove Atlantic. Pretty excited about it so far.

Read more from our Meet the Translator series.

Having grown up in Kentucky, moving to London, and then living in Tokyo, Morgan has had a fascinating life and career. A career which is only growing and growing.

Tokyo Ueno Station is all set to be a massive literary hit this year – a book we will soon all be talking about with enthusiasm and then some. So, what can you learn about the translator behind this upcoming big Japanese success? Find out right here, in our interview with the illustrious socialist superwoman translator Morgan.

This interview is part of our Meet the Translator series.

What made you want to be a translator, and how did you get started?

My first Japanese teacher, Michiko Kwak at Eastern Kentucky University, encouraged me at age 15 to pick a novel to work through reading as semi-independent study. I found it most useful to try to put it into my own language as a way of understanding what the Japanese was doing.

With the help of her and her teaching assistant, Mieko, I learned the pleasure of reading Japanese at the same time as I learned the joy of translation. I can’t wait to send her a copy of “Tokyo Ueno Station”.

Do you feel pressure to represent Japan with your translations?

The pressure I feel is more to represent people and stories that don’t fit Japan’s representations of itself. I’m interested in the outcasts, misfits, dropouts, and the people that most societies try to whitewash from their official histories. Translating for me is a way of rewriting expectations, challenging received ideas, and also, lest I sound too up my own ass, sharing great writing.

What are the best and worst parts of your job?

Best? As the daughter of a school librarian and a tobacco farmer from rural Kentucky, being a translator has allowed me to meet famous writers and gain access to a world I don’t think I could have otherwise. Worst? The hours, the pay, the isolation, the free work you’re expected to do, and being my own boss. I’ve learned I’m a terrible boss.

Do you find any unique challenges with translating the Japanese language?

It’s not always clear what the subject of a sentence is, or who is speaking, and so much is left unsaid. The challenge is to preserve ambiguities where they’re crucial without leaving the reader at a loss, to elucidate without overexplaining. Some days that’s fun, and other times, I wish I’d just stuck with Spanish. Though I’m sure it has its own issues…

What are you excited about or working on now?

I’m working on a follow-up from Yu Miri, The End of August, an experimental, semi-autobiographical epic spanning Korea and Japan over several decades and generations and blending Japanese and Korean in a way that feels very fresh and confrontational. Working on it makes my whole body tingle with the purest joy, and I can’t wait for the English-speaking world to see it.

How many languages do you speak, and what made you want to learn them?

My native dialect, Appalachian English, which gives me the most pleasure but which I only seem to speak when on the phone with my mom and dad, or when drunk and/or angry. Standard American English, which I learned in school and college, which I wanted to learn to be able to escape where I was from, a decision and feeling I more or less regret but can’t fault.

British English, after moving to London in 2009 and finding that my efforts at learning standard American English still left me open to ridicule. Japanese, after a week-long homestay at age 13 left me hospitalized in Tokyo with pneumonia and I first realized the power of learning another language. And Spanish, to the degree that I can order a drink and get bored when overhearing someone talk about their mortgage.

Has the perception of Japanese literature in translation changed during the time you have worked as a translator?

I think so. A few years ago, editors were always asking if I’d found “the next Murakami”. Perhaps his star has fallen a bit, but I’d prefer to think that I haven’t heard that particular question in a while due to the rise in translation of authors like Yoko Tawada, Hiromi Kawakami, and Hideo Furukawa.

What advice would you give someone who wants to become a translator?

Read broadly in every language you know. Read translations from your language(s), compare with the original, and note the techniques the translator has used.

Make friends with other translators; they are the most generous people in the world with their time, and they’re also great fun (I feel this must be said). Go to literary parties and introduce yourself to strangers as a translator. Fake it until someone takes you seriously. This is as close to the Konami code as there is for becoming a translator.

What are you reading right now?

I’m reading “The Revenge of the Translator” by Brice Matthieussent, translated by Emma Ramadan, just the kind of postmodern wildness I love. Emma most consistently translates books that blow my mind; I will read just about anything she does.

I’m also reading “Meaningless Meaninglessness” (意味のない無意味) by Chiba Masaya, a young Japanese philosopher.

Follow Morgan on Twitter.

Fond of literature from an early age, she won a Korean literature essay contest in 2013 held by LTI Korea. This year she has won a poetry translation award by the UNAM in Mexico. Ainhoa is currently living in Seoul as a fellowship student in the Institute of Literary Translation of Korea, translating from Korean to Spanish.

She is one of the very few translators of Korean literature into Spanish without a Korean upbringing.

 Part of our Meet the Translator Series.

Ainhoa Urquia (@objetivocorea)

What made you want to be a translator?

I’m lucky enough to have one of those beautiful life-changing love stories with Korean literature, like the ones in American romcoms where the main characters spot each other from opposite corners of a party, the music starts and the slow motion begins.

I was studying Psychology at the University of Málaga, which happened to be the first university in Spain to run a degree in Korean studies. I passed by a poster about an essay contest on Korean literature. At that time, I had no idea about Korea let alone Korean literature, but the poster said the participants could read an unedited Spanish translation of a short story by a Korean writer.

I’ve always enjoyed writing and at that time I was spending more time collaborating with magazines and fanzines and reading every book that ended up in my hands than focusing on my grades on psychoneuroendocrinology (which is fascinating). So I decided to participate in the contest.

The story was “Breath”, by Cheon Un Yeong and it clicked with me in a special way.  I ended up winning the first prize of that award, and when I listened to the author reading the original version in the ceremony I thought “Wow, this is beautiful, I need to understand this”.

A year later I was in Korea as an exchange student and I’ve been studying ever since, learning all about Korean culture, society, and literature. Now I’m a fellowship student at the LTI Korea and I’m graduating next year.

What’s your translation process?

First, I divide the text in chunks so I can manage it easily. Then, I work on each part. I check all the vocabulary, which is most of the time one Korean word or expression and next to it a list of a bunch of possibilities, so I don’t discard any option in the early stages of the vocabulary choice.

I also search some of the words I already know, especially in sentences with little context, because there’s always a chance that it’s a homonym for a completely different concept (which always creates funny situations before it’s untangled).

After that, I write a hideous literal translation that I use for reference, so I don’t lose the original expressions in case I change my mind after altering the text patterns too much. I then work on that draft to create the final translation.

This is the most creative part, and the reason I particularly love translating poetry because it’s more of a challenge and I can play with the author’s words over and over again until I say ‘Ok, this is as beautiful in Spanish as it is in Korean’.

Then I let it rest a few days so I can forget about it and check it with new eyes. That’s key for me. I look for a second opinion and have a colleague translator read it and finally I test it with someone who doesn’t speak Korean or knows anything about Korean culture, usually a member of my family.

How many languages do you speak and what made you learn them?

I’m a native speaker of Spanish, and I’ve learnt to love it even more now I live abroad and especially now that I’m a translator and I have to make sure my Spanish is on point.

Being native makes it easier, but it isn’t all it takes, you have to open the target language’s bonnet and get your hands greasy. Experimenting with my own mother tongue and getting to know it is one of the things I love the most about translating.

About my second language, I was so privileged. My father opened an English school where I attended for free from the age of 7. I had excellent teachers from the United Kingdom, Ireland, the US, and I learnt not only about the English language but about the culture, traditions, and cultural reference.

Many people look down on language instructors, but I think that when they’re engaged with what they do, they create a whole new world in their students’ minds.

What made you interested in studying multiple languages?

For me, it was a passion for languages and the realization that I had the potential to express myself in many different codes.

The rest of my classmates were from the wealthy zone of the city and I didn’t quite fit in. They all came wearing their uniform, straight from their private school and I was wearing just the same cargo jeans I had worn during the morning.

I was the manager’s daughter, but it was just a small family business. Then I kept on improving and when I was about 12 years old I was in the adult class with two guys from a company that sent its executives to improve their English skills.

They seemed really annoyed by my presence there, but I was happy because they were old and didn’t wear uniforms. But I’m digressing…

I also love French literature and culture and spent a semester in Normandy as well so I used to have a good command of French, but now every time I try to speak it I mix it with Korean structure and it’s a mess. I understand it pretty well though and I’d like to take it up again in the future.

I’m also interested in Spain’s regional languages like Galician, Basque, and Catalan. My grandmother was from Galicia, and I remember her language as the language of my summers in the Spanish countryside. Also, my name and first surname (we have two in Spain, the father’s and the mother’s) are Basque but I can’t even say hello in Basque, which is a super interesting pre-roman isolated language.

I was interested in learning more and really understanding my own name, just like the tarot parlours in the Korean streets where they analyze your name and let you know your fortune.

What are you reading right now?

Although I’m focused on translation at the moment, I also write poetry, so I’m following, from a distance, all of the young voices in Spain’s poetry scene at the moment, which is so exciting.

One is Ángelo Néstore, an Italian translator established in Málaga, that creates his work in Spanish as well. He won one of the biggest Spanish poetry awards last year with ‘Actos Impuros’, a celebration of queerness where he also explores the feelings of fatherhood/motherhood.

He’s also doing a lot to spread underrepresented perspectives among Spanish creators. Totally recommended!

What are you excited about or working on now?

Well, I’m just an emerging translator, so I haven’t got a book published yet, I hope to have good news about it next year, after my graduation from the LTI Korea. But I’m collaborating with a Spanish literary magazine Oculta Lit for their next issue with a few poems by Korean female authors.

I think it’ll be the first time a Spanish literature magazine features a piece of Korean literature so while I’m overwhelmed by the sense of responsibility, I’m also really excited. It’s so nice of the editors to trust me on this and bet on Korean literature, so I’ve put all my love into it. It’ll be out in January, I think. I’ll be spamming everyone about it on my Twitter @objetivocorea if anyone is interested.

How involved are you, in the promotion of the books you translate? Your views on social media?

It depends on the language you translate from. In my case, I translate Korean literature into Spanish, so it’s so specific and new in the Spanish market that first of all, I think we have to persuade everyone that’s it’s worth it!

So, yes, I’m 100% an advocate for the role of social media in promoting a culture, a new perspective, a new voice. I’m an active Instagrammer and I share all about Korean culture and my feelings about Korean culture and literature all the time, and now I get messages by people saying ‘hey, now I really want to read Korean books in Spanish, recommend me some!’

I think that when you’re honestly passionate about something and you’re able to transmit it to the people you interact with, they’ll become interested in it too. Of course, for an established literary tradition, I guess social media’s importance fades a bit, but for my case, it’s part of my job and I love doing it.

Thank you Ainhoa for this lovely interview! Follow her on twitter for her latest news.

Read our other translator interviews here

Part of the Meet the Translator series.

What made you want to be a translator?

I wanted to be a translator when I realized the importance of building an international audience for a country’s literature. I often read the translated poems of Rainer Maria Rilke and Fernando Pessoa, completely captivated by their writing and grateful for the fact that they were translated into English for readers like me to enjoy.

I thought about the vast sea of literature out there in so many different languages that could make such an impact on people’s lives if only we could read them in the language that we spoke. Being a bilingual Indonesian, I felt compelled to contribute to the art of translation in order to support and uplift the literary voices from my own country.

How did you get started?

I’m fairly new at translation. I started by doing simple texts for my mother, often times translating emails or legal documents for her, as she was not confident in her English. I volunteered for the Sumatran Orangutan Society for a brief period of time and translated several field reports for them regarding their replanting efforts in the rainforest to be sent to government officials.

I had a much bigger opportunity when my mother was working on a book of her own, Indonesian Textiles at the Crossroads of Culture, and needed someone to translate it to English for a wider release. Her book gave me the opportunity to work on a full-length text with another translator based in Indonesia.

I worked on it remotely while I was in the last term of my degree at the University of Bristol. It gave me the confidence to pursue translation even further. I would love to be involved with more nonfiction, or even literary works in the future.

How long does it take to translate a book, on average?

It took me about four to five months for me when I worked on Indonesian Textiles, bearing in mind that I had another translator on the project and we both worked as co-editors as well. So it depends on the length of the project and on how involved you are in other aspects of the book (editing, for example).

A lot of communication was required between the translators and the author, especially with such a technical book with a lot of specific jargon related to traditional Indonesian textiles.

What are you excited about or working on now?

I am starting my very own webcomic, which is due to be live online in the next month or two. It’s called Rosana! and it’s going to be a sci-fi adventure around the archipelago in Indonesia. As someone who loves comics and graphic novels, I really wanted to create what was essentially an Indonesian superhero story. I am working with a group of talented Indonesian artists, so that’s very exciting.

How involved are you, in the promotion of the books you translate? Your views on social media?

I like being fairly active in promotion. I love organizing book launches and yes, social media is kind of like a playground for me. It’s the perfect intersection between being fun and professional at the same time. You really can reach a wide audience with social media.

I think that the push for diverse voices (which, translation is a huge part of) has really accelerated and amplified through social media, so I really believe in its power as a tool for change in literary developments.

What are you reading right now?

The Lonely City by Olivia Laing.

Thank you Jessica! You can follow her on Twitter and Youtube.