[57th Modern Korean Literature Translation Awards] Fiction Commendation Award winner Jude Vandervort

For Jude Vandervort, translating Korean literature meant learning to move beyond the precision of scientific writing and embrace the possibilities of interpretation. A recent Rutgers University graduate who majored in cell biology and neuroscience with a minor in Korean, Vandervort won the fiction Commendation Award in this year’s Korea Times Literature Translation Awards for his translation of Jeong Ji-a’s novel “Bead by Bead.” The experience helped the aspiring health care professional see translation not simply as transferring words between languages, but as a literary art shaped by the person doing the translating. “It meant so much to me to learn how to stray from the literal and venture into more poetic verse,” Vandervort said in a written interview with The Korea Times. That interest first emerged while analyzing Korean articles in language classes at Rutgers in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Vandervort, who also served as a senior student ambassador for the university’s Asian Languages and Cultures Program, became fascinated by how a sentence’s emotional effect could