While studying English literature at the University of British Columbia, Hong began translating with the short story, The Woman Next Door by Ha Seong-nan. At the encouragement of a Korean language professor, she submitted the translation for The Korea Times Modern Korean Literature Translation Awards in 2001 and won the grand prize.[2][3] She later received grants from the Literature Translation Institute of Korea to translate the rest of the collection. Eighteen years after its Korean publication, it was published by Open Letter Books as Flowers of Mold in 2019.[3] Hong's second translation of Ha's fiction, Bluebeard's First Wife, was published the following summer with a grant from the Daesan Foundation. She became a judge of the newspaper's translation award herself in 2024.[4]
In addition to graduating from the University of Guelph with an MFA in creative writing, Hong's translations have garnered numerous accolades and praise, including the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grants for her translation of Han Yujoo's The Impossible Fairy Tale and two Harvey Awards for Best International Book.[5][6] Hong's work in the challenges of translating onomatopoetic phases and puns from Korean into English has been of noted success, such as the wordplay in Lemon by Kwon Yeo-sun.
"One formidable translation challenge to which Hong rises comes just three pages in, when Sanghui ponders the nickname given to the suspected killer Han Manu. Its source is Cho Yong-pil’s late-1970s ballad “Han-o-baeg-nyeon” (한오백년): to Manu’s classmates, “the opening words ‘ha-an-man-eu-eu-eun’ sounded just like his name. If you slurred the n sound so that you said ‘ha-an-man-u–u–u‘ instead, it was perfect.”[7]
