[57th Modern Korean Literature Translation Awards] Judges' report

The Korea Times' 57th Modern Korean Literature Translation Awards entries demonstrate the growing range of voices and talent within the world of Korean literature, and the translators who, with their passion, commitment and creativity, bring these voices to life for a greater reading public. Our discussions focused on how to balance the choices that a translator made, from larger decisions to finer details. We gave serious consideration to the translator’s selection of which texts to translate, both in terms of selecting more challenging texts, as well as texts that we considered to have greater literary merit within their genre. When it came to our final candidates, we considered more closely the translator’s ear for the music of the target language, the fluency of the translation ranging from phrasing, tone, diction and general grammatical structure of sentences, and in the case of poetry, other specific elements such as line breaks. We also weighed each text’s themes and social concerns, in terms of how the texts might reflect the unique nature of a translation award focused