Abstract

This work aims to analyze the characteristics of self-translation, focusing on the question of whether it can lead to a better result, considering the traditional perspective of “fidelity”. It is widely believed that self-translation can integrate into the author’s “continuous writing process”, potentially making the translation a more refined version of the work for readers from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Self-translation grants the author freedom to transform and adapt the original text and at the same time to rewrite own work in the target language respecting the initial intentions. For Umberto Eco in Come se si scrivessero due libri diversi self-translation is a «reinvention in different languages» (Eco 2013: 27), and in fact it does not allow readers or critics to question any changes, omissions, or alterations, since it assumes that the translator may have misunderstood or failed to grasp the author’s intentions. Ahn Junghyo’s Silver Stallion, translated into English by the author himself and published by Soho Press in New York in 1990, is regarded as one of the most successful Korean novels translated into another language. While its commercial success highlights the potential of self-translation as a valuable practice, the author’s deliberate simplification and clarification of his message in the English version – along with extensive adaptations made to render culturally specific elements more accessible to Western readers – inevitably resulted in a significantly transformed version of the novel. Consequently, both the English and the Korean texts can be viewed simultaneously as the original and the translation. Silver Stallion (1990) will be the subject of this research to deepen reflections on the self-translation process in a dimension in which terms such as “original”, “translation”, “author” and “translator” take on hybrid features and represent translation phenomena.