Found on 2026-10-10 by a search the owner asked for: a documented reception split over one translation, where each side’s implicit task can be read off what it praises and faults, for CLAIM-240, whose model of a holistic judgement as a population’s default weighting had only a constructed example.
The case
Han Kang’s 채식주의자 (Changbi, 2007) appeared in Deborah Smith’s English as The Vegetarian (Portobello, 2015; Hogarth, 2016) and won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize. The chair’s citation, as reported by Yonhap in the Korea Times, 17 May 2016 (https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/lifestyle/books/20160517/korean-novel-the-vegetarian-wins-man-booker-international-prize), praised “Deborah Smith’s perfectly judged translation”. In Korea the reception went the other way.
The Korean side, and what only bilinguals see. Charse Yun, “How the bestseller ‘The Vegetarian,’ translated from Han Kang’s original, caused an uproar in South Korea”, Los Angeles Times, 22 Sep 2017, https://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-korean-translation-20170922-story.html: “Korean-language media began to report allegations of numerous errors, omissions and embellishments.” Some errors are invisible in English: “Most English readers will simply glide over them unaware. Few will know, for example, that Smith confuses ‘arm’ (pal) for ‘foot’ (bal)”.
The features both sides perceive. Yun: “Smith amplifies Han’s spare, quiet style and embellishes it with adverbs, superlatives and other emphatic word choices that are nowhere in the original”, “on virtually every other page”; the embellishments “create more suspense and interest for the English reader, but for those who can read the original, it can be quite jarring.”
One perceiver, two verdicts. Yun on his first reading: “Here, finally, was a Korean book that worked spectacularly in English.” Then: “I looked at Han’s original text. I was astonished for a second time, but in a much more sobering way.” He ends: “For me, I can still admire the translation. I just have to keep one eye closed.”
The two tasks, stated. Deborah Smith, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Translation”, Los Angeles Review of Books, 11 Jan 2018, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-translation/. She quotes Daniel Hahn, a judge in 2017, on the prize’s judges: they “aren’t comparing the original and the translation and evaluating the process (the decisions, the ingenuities, the slips…)”, but are attempting “to evaluate the finished English-language work on their own terms.” Smith: “This is one way of assessing translation quality; it is not the only one.” On Korea: “Partly because assessing literary translations in South Korea does usually involve comparison, some people couldn’t understand why those ‘slips’ that Hahn mentions hadn’t disqualified my translation from praise and awards.” The same feature takes opposite valence: reviewers called the English “subtle”, “precise and spare” and “bone-spare”, while “some people believe that my translation ‘overly poeticized’ an original that was spare and understated”. Her own weighting: “Quality is yet another thing translators can choose to be faithful to”, and “some of what was filed under ‘mistake’ was actually just difference.”
An Anglophone dissenter on the English alone. Tim Parks, “Raw and Cooked”, NYR Daily, 20 Jun 2016, https://www.nybooks.com/online/2016/06/20/raw-and-cooked-translation-why-the-vegetarian-wins/: “None of the judges for the prize appear to know Korean. Nor do I.” His task: “I must consider the relationship between content and style in the English translation.” On “Blood ribboned out of her wrist”: “The fancy metaphor of blood ‘ribboning’ seems totally out of line with our narrator’s expressive abilities.” Verdict: “the translation frequently in trouble with register and idiom.” Yun credits him with detecting, “without knowing a single word of Korean”, the dissonance Yun traced to the source.
The Korean critics’ task, as scholarship states it. Sun Kyoung Yoon, “Fidelity or infidelity? The mistranslation controversy over The Vegetarian”, Target 35(2):242–261, 2022, doi:10.1075/target.21001.yoo, finds the Korean debates “dominated by a preoccupation with fidelity and literal translation”, “regarding accuracy or fidelity as the sole criterion for a good translation”, and traces this to “three levels of political anxiety” (abstract only).
What it can show
That real populations bring different default tasks to “how good is this translation?”, and that the tasks can be read off what each side praises and faults: here they are stated outright, by a judge for one side and by a translation scholar for the other. The components the profile model names (TERM-043) are the ones the parties argue over: lexical accuracy, register, emphasis, the English style itself. Yun’s double verdict is the clearest documented instance of CLAIM-240’s central move: one perceiver, one rendering, one set of perceived differences, two judgements under two tasks. That is what CLAIM-128 allows and the claim’s reply to CLAIM-244 needs: a holistic judgement that is fidelity under a default task, and a different task giving a different one.
What it cannot show
- Condition (c) is met only in part. The split is a difference of weights only for components both sides perceive: register, emphasis, the embellishing adverbs, which Yun, Parks and the English reviewers all hear. For other components it is a difference of access. Lexical errors such as pal for bal are invisible to readers without Korean (“glide over them unaware”). For those, the Anglophone weight is zero by blindness, not by choice, and the claim’s model, which weights components the judges perceive, does not cover them.
- No weights can be estimated. The case is qualitative. There are no ratings, so no weighting can be fitted on one set of renderings and tested on another. It illustrates the claim’s model and does not test its defeat condition.
- The strongest reply. A defender of CLAIM-244 would say the split is not two weightings of one profile but two different objects of judgement: the judges rate an English novel, the Korean critics rate a relation between two texts. Hahn’s “on their own terms” supports that reading. On it, the judges’ “fidelity” is not a fidelity judgement at all. The claim can answer that a weighting which puts zero on every comparative component is still a weighting, but the case cannot decide between the readings. Yoon’s “political anxiety” adds a further determinant of the Korean weights beyond the task.
- What would close the gap. A study in the shape of the discriminating study (CASE-055). Take passages of the novel with the source and Smith’s English, and code each divergence by component, separating those a monolingual reader can perceive (register, emphasis) from those only a bilingual can (lexical errors). Have bilingual Korean readers and monolingual English readers rate fidelity, and also rate each component where they can. Fit each population’s weights on half the passages and test on the rest. The claim predicts that holistic ratings are predicted by the fitted weights better than by the best single component, within each population, and that the populations’ weights differ on the components both can perceive.
- Smaller limits. Han Kang’s approval of the translation is reported by Smith, not checked first-hand. The Korean source was not inspected here; the divergences are as Yun, Parks and the Korean critics report them.
Sources
None of these works is held in the record as a LIT. They are cited here by identifier. None is a machine-learning work.
- Han Kang, 채식주의자 (Changbi, 2007), ISBN 9788936433598. Not read.
- Han Kang, The Vegetarian, trans. Deborah Smith (Portobello, 2015; Hogarth, 2016), ISBN 9781101906118. Not read here; quoted only as Parks and Yun quote it.
- Korea Times (Yonhap), 17 May 2016, URL above. Read by the search online; no saved copy, not re-checked here.
- Yun, Charse, Los Angeles Times, 22 Sep 2017, URL above. Read directly.
- Smith, Deborah, Los Angeles Review of Books, 11 Jan 2018, URL above. Read directly. Hahn is quoted through Smith.
- Parks, Tim, “Raw and Cooked”, NYR Daily, 20 Jun 2016, URL above. Read directly.
- Yoon, Sun Kyoung (2022), Target 35(2):242–261, doi:10.1075/target.21001.yoo. Abstract only, via Crossref.
- Kim, Wook-Dong (2018), “The ‘Creative’ English Translation of The Vegetarian by Han Kang”, Translation Review 100(1):65–80, doi:10.1080/07374836.2018.1437098. Not read in full; known through Crossref and a Korea Times report of 3 Apr 2018.
- Yun, Charse, “You Say Melon, I Say Lemon”, Korea Exposé. Could not be fetched; unread.