Fiction Grand Prize winner Wingshun Pang
Wingshun Pang is a scientific translator from French to English, who majored in translation studies at York University in Toronto, Canada. Born in Hong Kong, she moved to the Great White North before her first birthday, and later became interested in learning different languages as she searched for a sense of identity.
With her background in diverse cultures and languages, she identifies herself as “a multi-disciplinary creative who finds joy in creating various types of art, from handicrafts to dance to modeling to writing.”
She started learning Korean at age 13 when her Korean Canadian friend introduced her to K-pop. During her undergraduate studies, she was introduced to Korean translation by her classmate, leading her to join a media translation contest by the Literary Translation Institute of Korea in 2021, for which she made it into the top five finalists.
This year, she enrolled in a Korean translation course at the University of British Columbia run by professor Bruce Fulton, a noted Korean literary translator who himself won The Korea Times' translation contest three times in 1985, 1987 and 1989.
Pang translated novelist Kim Cho-yeop's short story "Why Don't The Pilgrims Come Back” for this year's contest.
Having been introduced to the novelist by Fulton during the course, the sci-fi story and the work of a female author intrigued her to work on Kim's piece.
“I found the epistolary framework refreshing and was intrigued by the first lines of the story. I wanted to know why Sophie had left, what sort of village she had run away from and where she was going,” she said.
She shared that finding the right balance between accurate translations while preserving the creativity of the original texts was challenging.
“I was very concerned about over-translating and taking too much creative liberty, because I had heard about the controversy and backlash over the English translation of Han Kang's 'Vegetarian' some years ago. At the same time, I didn't want my translation to become stilted and awkward by following the Korean too closely,” she said.
“Deciding how to render the special scientific terms and terms invented by the author also proved to be an interesting challenge. I suppose that's where my experience in both conducting research as a scientific translator and thinking creatively as an artist helped.”
When asked how she defines a good translation, she answered it is about capturing the accurate sensitivity that the original text intended to deliver rather than offering a direct interpretation.
“I think that a great translation walks the razor-thin line between accurately rendering the intended meaning of the original and evoking the sensation/sense of the source text rather than a word-for-word interpretation,” she said.
“It also flows smoothly and lyrically, striving to replace the linguistic or stylistic conventions of the source language that would make the text awkward for target readers to read, with devices that are natural in the target language. Lastly, a good translation knows when and how to make explicit what is typically implicit to the audience in the source culture, and vice versa.”