Sun Kyoung Yoon

10.18399/acta.2021.24.2.004

Deborah Smith Human Acts decolonizing translation foreignization cultural imperialism

Translation is not just linguistic transfer, but also a process of political writing; there is often an unequal power relationship between two languages, dominant and marginal. From this political perspective, I examine Deborah Smith’s English translation of the Korean novel Human Acts by Han Kang. I argue that her translation challenges the perceived universality of Western knowledge and acknowledges the multiplicity of experience, culture, and knowledge of the Korean people in a decolonizing translation. The translator’s work, in what Lawrence Venuti calls foreignization, rejects the hierarchy between two cultures and the supremacy of English in a variety of ways. She respects Korean language, culture, and history as significant elements in her translation by retaining and explaining culture-specific terms, and by adding Korean history to the paratextual material and the actual text of the translation. Smith attempts to resist the oppression of cultural imperialism, not allowing Korean cultural otherness to be appropriated by Anglo-American culture.