Deborah Smith (translator), Date of Birth

Deborah Smith (translator)

British translator of Korean

Date of Birth: 15-Dec-1987

Profession: translator

Nationality: United Kingdom

Zodiac Sign: Sagittarius

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londonkoreanist

Deborah Smith (born 15 December 1987) is a British translator of Korean fiction.
She translated The Vegetarian by Korean author Han Kang, for which she and the author were co-winners of the Man Booker International Prize in 2016.
There has been some controversy about the translation, with Korean readers claiming that she may have taken some liberties while translating The Vegetarian.
Smith may have mistakenly attributed certain parts of the dialogue to the wrong characters.
However, Smith has defended her translation, stating that one cannot translate text literally from one language to another, so liberties must be taken.
Han herself has stood by Smith's translation.After graduating from the University of Cambridge, Smith began learning Korean in 2009, as she found out that there were few translations of the Korean language available in English, despite South Korea being a modern country.
Smith founded Tilted Axis Press, a non-profit publishing house focusing on contemporary fiction specifically from Asia.
She is currently a research fellow at SOAS.Having learned Korean through written language rather than language immersion, she usually avoids translating fiction with a lot of dialogue.In June 2018 Smith was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in its "40 Under 40" initiative.