2.4 Readings Yide Cai

 I appreciate the range of perspectives in this week’s readings from the defense of the translator herself, to the critiques, to the more distanced academic analyses. What strikes me most, overall, is the irony surrounding the entire debate. South Korea today is, for me, by many measures, wealthier, more technologically advanced, and more globally influential than the UK. And yet the discussion is still framed through the lens of imperialism, as if Britain remains the center of cultural authority. Part of this, of course, is because English remains the dominant global language. But it is also tied to the way South Koreans themselves often continue to believe that Western validation and Western prizes matter more than their own literary ecosystems. Even within the academy, South Korean scholars appear to remain beholden to translation standards that originated in the West. What results is a kind of echo chamber, or a distorted mirror, where the “discovery” of something foreign feels novel and revelatory.

At the same time, the readings were genuinely useful for thinking about translation as a practice. One idea I find myself returning to is that a translation can, in some cases, be “better” than the original. A clear example is The Three-Body Problem, whose global success is inseparable from its English translation. The original Chinese text contains language that now reads as dated or sexist such as repeatedly describing a female character simply as “a beauty” and the translation arguably made the work more legible and acceptable to a global readership. There is also the blunt reality that most readers of a translation will never read the original text; if they could, they would simply read it instead. This is true even for judges of prestigious literary prizes. That fact grants enormous power to the translator and requires a shared trust that everyone involved is acting in good faith.

What worries me, reading this controversy, is the possibility that if translators push the boundaries too far, that trust could erode, and the entire system could begin to break down. If no one trusts translations anymore, then the bridge between languages collapses. The critiques also reminded me of how similar translation is to theater: a translated novel is like a particular production of a play, not the play itself. A good play can have a bad production. That distinction feels intuitive to me as a theater-maker, but it is fascinating to see it articulated in the context of fiction.

I was also struck by the discussion of “standard novelese” the recycled vocabulary and rhythms that circulate across contemporary novels. I’ve noticed this for a long time, and I feel the same fatigue in theater, where certain lines and gestures reappear endlessly across different plays. One advantage of being a second-language user, I think, is that we are less likely to fall into these inherited tropes. We approach language with a slightly estranged, fresher eye and that estrangement, rather than being a weakness, can be a real artistic strength.