Chapter 6
I’m translating the full chapter into HTML-formatted prose now, keeping the special reading passages styled separately and preserving the chapter structure.CHAPTER_TITLE: The Translation Job That Turned Out to Be a Jackpot
The Willow Publishing office in Seongbuk District, Seoul.
“Team Leader, we’ve got an interview test scheduled this afternoon for one translation applicant.”
“This time, I hope it’s someone decent for once...”
Team Leader Yu Na-ri drew in a sharp breath as she spoke.
“How’s the resume? Does he actually look like he knows how to translate properly?”
“Well, that’s the thing. It’s a little hard to tell. He didn’t graduate from a related department, and he doesn’t have any overseas study experience either.”
“...Damn it.”
Yu frowned at once.
“He’s not another fraud, is he?”
She felt the recoil of it in her bones.
And no wonder.
“These days, AI has gotten so advanced that everybody and their dog claims they can translate with it. Just thinking about that makes me jolt awake in the middle of the night.”
“Me too...”
They had already been burned badly once.
They had finished a Chinese translation, published it, and only then discovered that the whole thing had been translated with AI, leaving not just the spelling but even the local expressions a complete mess.
They had to recall every copy that had been printed, and the losses had been brutal.
“How is it that it gets harder and harder to find a proper translator every year?”
“It seems the truly talented ones go to companies, while the mediocre ones get pushed out by AI and fall behind.”
Kim Dae-ri added cautiously,
“Still, if we at least interview him, we can weed out more than ninety percent of them.”
“Ugh... fine. We’ll see him later, then.”
“I’ll get everything ready.”
***
At 4:30 p.m., Kang Seo-jun, having taken a half-day off, arrived at Willow Publishing.
I never thought I’d end up visiting a publishing house in my life.
He had liked books since he was young, sure, but he had never even imagined himself doing work like this.
Knock, knock.
When he knocked, a young man greeted him.
“Kang Seo-jun?”
“Ah, yes.”
“Thanks for coming all this way. Please wait in that conference room for ten minutes, and we’ll start the interview right away.”
“Yes, sir.”
A woman with a sharp, severe look stepped in.
From the way everyone around her seemed to tread carefully, she had to be at least team-leader level.
“I’m Team Leader Yu Na-ri.”
She gave him a brief greeting, as if she had no interest in wasting time, then went straight to the point.
“How long have you studied Chinese?”
“It hasn’t been long, but I’m confident in my translation ability.”
At Seo-jun’s answer, Yu Na-ri suppressed a sigh inwardly.
As expected, another dud.
She had just received a string of urgent emails from the Chinese side asking them to speed up the schedule, so her mood was already foul.
The type I hate most are the ones who see the high hourly pay and think they can just coast through on that alone.
She had no intention of indulging him further.
“Please introduce yourself in Chinese.”
Without warning, she switched to Chinese.
She had intended to stand up immediately if he couldn’t answer properly.
“Ni hao, wo shi Jiang Seo-jun, jin nian san shi sui, wo tong guo zi xue zhang wo le zhong wen.
Xi wang neng ying pin fu ye fan yi gang wei, rang wo de yu yan neng li wei shi ji gong zuo zuo chu gong xian.”
(Hello, I’m Kang Seo-jun. I’m thirty this year, and I learned Chinese by myself.)
(I’ve applied for this side-job translation position, and I hope to put my language ability to practical use in real work.)
“?!”
His pronunciation was far more fluent than she had expected.
What’s more, the vocabulary he used was distinctly professional.
Compared to herself, who had finished middle school, high school, and university in China, he was in no way lacking.
Don’t be surprised. He probably prepared this basic introduction in advance anyway.
She fired off the next question in Chinese as well.
“If it turns out you’ve had a third party do the translation, or you’ve used AI and passed it off as your own work, the publishing house could sue you. You understand that, right?”
“Of course. I don’t entrust my work to other people.”
“And you can read and write Chinese too?”
“Of course.”
Team Leader Yu opened the book they were supposed to translate and showed it to him.
It was a book written entirely in Chinese characters from start to finish.
And yet.
“The mountains are green, and the river flows on without end. Far away, the Heavenly Demon howled. He said he no longer wished to live. But under heaven...”
Kang Seo-jun read it off smoothly, without hesitation.
He was even handling the tones perfectly, something that’s hard to master through self-study alone.
“That’s enough.”
Yu Na-ri could not hide her surprise.
“Mr. Kang Seo-jun. How is your pronunciation this fluent? Have you really never been to China? If not for studying abroad, did you live there at least?”
“It’s embarrassing, but I haven’t been overseas yet.”
“...Huh?”
She was genuinely thrown.
How had he taught himself to such a fluent level of pronunciation and interpretation?
“Sorry to ask this, but... and I mean absolutely no offense here. Is your family from a Chinese Korean community or something...?”
“No. I’m a pure-blooded Korean.”
“You’ve never even attended a language academy?”
“No, sir.”
“...That’s amazing.”
There was nothing to criticize, and no reason to try.
“You’re hired.”
Without another moment’s deliberation, Team Leader Yu announced it on the spot.
“You’re hired. When can you start working?”
“I should be able to start as early as tomorrow.”
“Our schedule is pretty tight. In that case, it’d be best to have you begin right away...”
“Yes, that works for me.”
“Good. Then discuss the detailed terms with Kim Dae-ri, and...”
***
The Heavenly Demon Wants to Die with Pride.
It was said to be the hottest web novel in China at the moment.
The story was about a Heavenly Demon who had conquered the Central Plains and lived through ages untold, only to set out on a journey because he wanted to die.
Willow Publishing had originally been famous for issuing literary works, but with the market turning sour lately, they were broadening their scope.
This web novel translation was one part of that project.
Kim Dae-ri, who would be in charge of me, handed over the book and gave me a reminder.
“One volume is about 300 pages. But the amount is substantial. Professionals do about ten pages a day.”
That was for people who translated full-time, too.
“Generally speaking, doing two pages an hour is considered a lot. Of course, we’ll smooth out the prose on our end, but since you need to do the basic adaptation, we’ll need you to render it freely rather than word-for-word.”
“Then the pay...”
“To be exact, it’s paid per piece. Ten thousand won per page.”
If the average was two pages an hour, then that came to about twenty thousand won an hour, just as the posting had said.
“The deadline actually isn’t that generous. We need to finish it within this month, so... if you can handle the front part, we’ll bring in more people and have them work on the back half. So please keep going as long as you can.”
“Understood.”
At 8:00 p.m., after dinner, I sat down at my desk and opened the Chinese book.
Of course I’d received the script file by email as well.
But before translating, I thought it was only proper to read it once purely as a reader.
Swish.
I slowly turned the pages from the very first one.
“...This is fun.”
The atmosphere was quite different from Korean-style novels.
Swish, swish.
Whoosh.
The pages started turning faster and faster.
How long had it been like that?
“Oh, I’m already done?”
I checked the clock and saw that about an hour had passed.
“I could work for at least three more hours before bed.”
I immediately powered on my laptop and started translating.
Tap, tap, tap-tap.
Tap.
Tap-tap-tap.
My fingers began moving elegantly over the keyboard.
I didn’t feel as if I were laboring or straining myself at all.
It’s like getting paid to read a book for free, I guess.
Even though it was written in Chinese, thanks to my ability, it didn’t feel any different from Korean to me.
It was almost like turning a dialect into standard speech.
“N-nice to meet you” to “It’s nice to meet you,” that sort of difficulty.
Maybe I can finish this faster than I expected.
***
Three days later.
Willow Publishing.
“T, Team Leader...”
Kim Dae-ri came looking for Team Leader Yu with a thoroughly dazed expression.
“Why are you making that face again? Did something happen?”
“Well...”
Kim Dae-ri hesitated before speaking.
“You remember that translator who interviewed a few days ago?”
“Seo-jun Kang? The guy who was good at Chinese?”
“Yes, that’s the one. He just emailed us.”
“...Don’t tell me he ran away?”
Yu asked in disbelief.
“Or is he asking for a raise because the work’s too hard? At that rate, the hourly pay is already pretty good.”
“No, it’s not that...”
Kim Dae-ri carefully held out a printout.
“He already finished the job.”
“...What?”
“The translation for Volume 1 of The Heavenly Demon Wants to Die with Pride that we outsourced. It’s already done.”
“...What?!”
Team Leader Yu’s eyes went wide as she accepted the 300-page document.
“This is the finished work?”
“Yes...”
“What the hell. He didn’t use AI, did he?”
Three days.
How was anyone supposed to translate 300 pages in just three days?
“Even if he used AI and only polished the prose afterward, that would still take longer than this.”
“...True.”
“But the manuscript quality is incredible.”
“!?”
Team Leader Yu hurriedly opened the translation and started reading.
The insects of the world, listen well. A mere mortal’s sword can never reach this sovereign.
If you should meet me, forget about begging for your life and bring me art worthy of inspiring heroes.
Only then might the edge of your blade reach me.
Even in Korean, the opening was overwhelming.
The first page was a complete handcrafted piece.
She wondered whether he had only done the beginning well and then botched the rest, so she skipped ahead and checked the middle.
So this small teacup holds the whole world.
All things under heaven are steeped in weariness and emptiness; how could one fail to look farther?
Fallen blossoms. Like a single flower dropping away, the whole world is severed by my blade and scattered to the wind.
“This isn’t AI...”
Team Leader Yu could say it with confidence now.
“AI couldn’t produce this level of quality.”
“That’s right. I was shocked too when I read it.”
“It’s even more delicate in expression than most professional translators.”
The writing was good enough that they might not even need to polish it at all.
“...How on earth did he do this?”