LTI Korea 
DLKL 
SIWF 
Between Sentences: Reflections from An LTI Korea Translation Award Winner scrap
by Ki-Hyang Lee
Translated by Paige Aniyah Morris
March 5, 2026
Visitors to the annual Frankfurt Book Fair can encounter booths from countries all over the world, each making a concerted effort to introduce its national literature to an international audience. Korea is no exception.
Founded in 1996 as the Korean Literature Translation Fund and later designated a special corporation under the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism in 2005, the Literature Translation Institute of Korea is now marking thirty years as a leading force behind Korean literature’s global outreach. During that time, LTI Korea has financially supported the publication of more than 2,400 works of Korean literature in forty-four countries and continues to play an active role in funding translations today.
I got my own start as a translator in the winter of 1998 when I received a grant from the Korean Literature Translation Fund. In that sense, my career and LTI Korea can be said to have practically grown alongside each other. While Korea is now one of the world’s top dream travel destinations, there was a time not so long ago when it was hard to find foreigners who had even heard of the country.
The LTI Korea Translation Award was established in 1993 to foster more professional literary translators and to raise interest in literary translation both in Korea and abroad by selecting outstanding translations among the works of Korean literature published overseas. Now every year, first-, second-, and third-place prizes are awarded to translations of Korean literature into three foreign languages.
I was honored to receive the 2025 prize alongside Najbar-Miller Justyna Agata, the Polish translator of Han Kang’s We Do Not Part, and Tayfun Kartav, the Turkish translator of Chang Kang-myoung’s Homodominance. Given how few awards exist for translators, it should not be surprising that this one is so highly coveted in our field.
When I first learned the news, my immediate thought was that I owed this honor to the unwavering support of LTI Korea, which has worked tirelessly for decades to make Korean literature truly global.
At the end of last November, I returned to Korea to accept the award—my first winter visit since my study-abroad days. Although my visit was brief, feeling the full force of winter in my homeland again was a deeply moving experience. The ceremony brought together my fellow LTI Korea Translation Award recipients, winners of the Award for Aspiring Translators and the Outstanding Service Award, esteemed guests and judges there to congratulate the winners, and representatives from LTI Korea and the Ministry of Culture. What delighted me the most was getting to meet and talk with translators I had previously known only by name. A fleeting thought crossed my mind that day: How great would it be if there were a regular gathering like this, where translators of Korean literature could come together to exchange and discuss ideas?
In all honesty, I never once dreamed of becoming a translator. I had always kept works of foreign literature close at hand, but I never imagined I would be the one to translate such stories myself. Had it not been for that fateful translation grant twenty-eight years ago, I would likely have continued to read foreign literature while remaining largely oblivious to the time and painstaking effort that translators put into their craft.
There is a saying that goes: Translation is treason. A task that requires restraint, wavering between the more literal translation and the more liberal one, resisting the urge to interpret or alter each word and sentence according to one’s own whims. Work that leaves the translator lost in unfamiliar woods, sometimes missing the beauty that lies beyond the forest of the source text. I have spent countless long and grueling hours on this task—from my very first translation, Kim Jooyoung’s A Fisherman Does Not Break the Reeds, to the more than forty works of Korean literature I have translated into German since. I still vividly remember the days I spent wandering from library to library with thick Korean-German and German- Korean dictionaries in tow. I also remember, like it was only yesterday, how happy I was when the advent of online dictionaries lifted that literal weight off my shoulders. And now, I’ve gotten to a point where I don’t need a dictionary at all. The world has changed over the years, yet I am still living as a translator, drifting between sentences.
Each time I complete a manuscript, I am reminded yet again how difficult and arduous a task translation still is. Before I can even savor the joy of holding a published translation of mine in my hands, the fear of critics and judgment comes rushing in. And yet the moment I encounter new words and sentences, sometimes chilling and other times indescribably beautiful, my insistence that I have no more translations left in me completely falls away, and before I know it, I am drawing a breath and stepping up to face another work of literature head-on.
A translated work’s journey into the world can never be accomplished through the translator’s efforts alone. The voyage is made possible by the excellent editors who toil alongside us, refining the text to breathe new life into it in the reader’s language. Likewise, I know I’m where I am today thanks to the translators who came before me—those who, by the time I started knocking on random German publishers’ doors with my first translation in hand, had sowed the seeds that allowed Korean literature to take root in a land once barren of our stories— as well as my dedicated fellow translators who are every day, in places unseen, walking this path with me.
Looking ahead, I sincerely hope that LTI Korea will remain a steadfast source of support for young translators on this same journey.
Writer 필자 소개
Ki-Hyang Lee
Ki-Hyang Lee is the director of the German publishing house Märchenwald Verlag and a Korean language instructor at the University of Munich. She has translated Han Kang’s The Vegetarian and Human Acts, as well as Cho Nam-joo’s Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, into German. In 2024, she won the Leipzig Book Fair Prize for her translation of Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny, and in 2025, she was awarded the Mirok Li Prize.
Translator 번역가 소개
Paige Aniyah Morris
Paige Aniyah Morris is a writer and translator from Jersey City, New Jersey, who now lives in Seoul, where she teaches creative writing and literary translation at LTI Korea Translation Academy. She has translated works by writers such as Pak Kyongni and Han Kang.
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