GKL Foundation launches literature translation award
The Grand Korea Leisure (GKL) Foundation has created a new translation award called the “Global Korea Literature Translation Award.”
The foundation was established in 2014 by the public corporation Grand Korea Leisure Co. Ltd, an affiliate of the Korea Tourism Organization that operates foreigner-only casinos in the country, and is funded by the GKL Co. Ltd.
The new award will receive applications for translated works of Korean literature starting Aug. 1 through Sept. 30 this year. Submissions are open only to English translations. After testing the ground this year, the award will expand to include translations into other languages and also increase the prize money in the years to come. At the moment, submissions are open for fiction (short stories or novels over 5,000 words) and poems (over 20 pieces).
Winners will be announced in November through the GKL Translation Award website, www.gkltranslationaward.org. Prize money will be 20 million won for the winner, 7 million won for the runner-up and 5 million won for third. Award winners will be given opportunities to publish their work with foreign publishers.
“Many people might be wondering why a company that supports the operation of casinos for foreigners would be launching an award like this,” said Lee Duk-joo, chairman of the GKL Foundation, during a press conference Thursday in Seoul.
“However, the GKL is a public company and its foundation supports projects for the less fortunate and several foreign ODA (official development assistant) projects. While corporations are reducing social welfare projects, we’re expanding ours. As part of our efforts, we thought it would be meaningful to establish infrastructure for Korean literature translation to help promote the globalization of our literature.
“Because we don’t have expertise in this field, we invited two experts to join our initiative — Kim Ji-myung of the Korea Heritage Education Institute, who is a former Korea Times reporter and was part of Korea’s first batch of simultaneous interpreters, and professor Lee Young-jun of Kyung Hee University’s Humanitas College, who is editor-in-chief of Azalea, the journal of Korean literature and culture at Harvard’s Korea Institute. Although there are several international awards that already exist in the field, we hope to establish this award as a prestigious award that fosters and introduces new talented translators.”
Kim Ji-myung, president of the Korea Heritage Education Institute, who will administrate the award, said, “I have wanted to start a project like this even with my private money. I will do my best to contribute to making this award an internationally successful award.”
Professor Lee Young-jun, who is a member of the executive committee, said they aim to be more faithful to the target language.
“What I realized when I was studying at Harvard 18 years ago was that the people there had different perceptions. A professor there said there were only a dozen books that could be used in class out of the three to four hundred Korean books translated into English. That was because all the books were translated with government money, with producer-oriented perceptions rather than reader-oriented. Evaluation was done by Koreans. Most translations were of works written during the Japanese colonization of Korea.
“What I noticed in students who enroll in my classes here was that they used to be usually Korean-Americans, but now there are more foreign- ers. Their interest stemmed from Korean TV dramas, movies and music. They want contemporary literature. We need to translate works that can directly connect them to Korean culture and the evaluation must be done by foreigners.”
Lee also said it was important to leave the works to be edited by locals to suit the audience when publishing overseas.
“The publishing scene in the English market in the U.S. and England is different than it is in Korea,” he said. “The editors there edit writers’ works heavily. Those editors know the market and what their readers want. Korean writers are appalled at the thought of this because, in Korea’s publishing industry, a writer’s works are considered as an artisan’s craftwork. But it’s important to leave it to the editors there to pick and choose works that would fit their market.
“This is why we’re going to involve foreign judges. Except for one judge who will be Korean, all of the rest out of the five to seven judges will be foreigners and renowned figures in translated literature. We expect this will lead to fresh results and a completely different award from the rest of existing translation awards.”