And I think partly again that was because I didn’t have a sort of cultural upbringing and I lived in a boring, ugly town and didn’t really travel…our family holidays were inside England every year and so I guess it was just curiosity about the rest of the world and wanting to travel, I suppose. I read literature, and I mainly read (contemporary) books in translation. So yeah, in that sense it was easier than maybe some other languages that I’d chosen.Īnd if you ask why translation, then its because well, reading and writing was all I ever did or was interested in. You can learn to read it in a couple of hours, as opposed to Japanese or Chinese where you spend years learning the many characters. So unlike something like Japanese or Chinese, which say, I’d already read literature of in translation, I’d never read anything in Korean.Īlso, Korean has a phonetic alphabet. And because I wanted to be a translator, I thought it made sense to choose one where almost nobody in the UK did study and there weren’t lots of books already available in English. And I had no connection really with any language, or culture or country so I had to just choose one. It’s different in England because more people tend to be monolingual, so you do just pick a language sometimes. I hadn’t read a Korean book, I hadn’t met a Korean person, I didn’t eat Korean food because I didn’t grow up in London, and this was six years ago. Well Korean was slightly random in the sense that I had no connection with Korean. In the sense that you picked up a language only as late as your 20s, and you did so with a focussed view to be a translator. But with your career, and with The Vegetarian, what you’ve done seems quite extraordinary. The first thing that seems to be common about translations, at least in the mainstream view in India, is that you pick up a text that’s written in what’s called your ‘second language’ and translate it into your first language, your ‘mother tongue’. This book, which was later titled The Vegetarian, went on to win Man Booker Prize International Prize in 2016.įor the unacquainted, this seems like a magical beginning, but over a conversation with Mint at the Jaipur Literature Festival, Smith strips down the dream run, speaks about what its like translating three books each by two very different Korean authors, and more. Smith started working on it, she says, with extensive help from a dictionary app on her phone.

A couple years on, she got her first book assignment: a 2007 book by an author called Han Kang. Like most Britishers, she was monolingual till she picked up Korean in 2010 with a view to become a translator. Jaipur: Deborah Smith was 22 when she first started learning a new language.

Deborah smith the vegetarian