1. Submit only five pages (double-spaced Times New Roman pt. 12 fiction once-inch margin on all sides of A4) of fiction or three poems. I also recommend you submit the Korean source as well but you don’t have to. (More on this in no.7.)
2. Each manuscript gets critiqued by everyone in the workshop except the submitter. The submitter may not comment during the group critique (unless explicitly asked to do so by a commenter to clear something up) but may say something after all the oral comments have been made.
3. Commenters must say what they like about the manuscript first. This is just good workshop manners.
4. Do not nitpick. Deal only with overarching issues in the manuscript or a general issue that everyone might be interested in (how to translate satoori, gendered pronouns, etc.). Leave the nitpicking in tracked changed for the submitter to deal with privately later.
5. NEVER EVER EVER start your comments with, “I don’t know anything about poetry, but…” WE GET IT, YOU DON’T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT POETRY.
6. Send your critiqued manuscripts to the translator when you’ve finished. Send them to everyone in the group because it’s interesting to see what other translators have said about someone else’s manuscript. Unless you have a secret message for someone (“Sung, the calls are coming from inside the house!!!”).
7. Something I am not forcing in my workshops but has been a useful rule in the past: read the translation first, or read the translation and only refer to the source if something confuses you. This is to prevent nitpicking over simple misreading issues. But I find some people need their work compared against the Korean more than their artistry in English commented on, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
—Anton Hur
Smoking Tigers 