Nicky Harman

Literary translator. Also lecturer, Imperial College London

London, UK

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Nicky Harman lives in the UK. She works as a translator as well as teaching on a translation studies course at Imperial College London.

Published Translations:

Short stories by Han Dong and Roan Ching-Yueh for 2009 Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture, 2009.

Message from Unknown Chinese Mothers (Author: Xinran), Chatto & Windus, 2010.

China Witness (author: Xinran), oral history Co-translator with Esther Tyldesley and Julia Lovell. Chatto & Windus , 2008.

Banished! (author: Han Dong) (《扎根》 韩东), novel. University of Hawai’i Press, 2009. Won a PEN Translation Fund Award (2006) for this work. Longlisted for Man Asian Literary Prize, 2008.

‘Long Corridor, Short Song’ (author: Zi Ren, in To Pierce the Material Screen: An Anthology of 20th Century HK Literature, to be pub. Renditions, Hong Kong 2008); (《长廊的短调》 梓人) short story.

China Along the Yellow River (author: Prof. Cao Jinqing, pub. Routledge Curzon, December 2004); (《黄河边的中国》 曹锦清) sociology of rural China.

K – The Art of Love (author: Hong Ying, pub. Marion Boyars, 2002); (《K》 虹影) novel.

‘The Iron’ (author: Ding Liying, in English-language edition of Today/ Jintian, journal of modern Chinese literature, 2001); (《熨斗》 丁丽英) short story.

Research publications:

What's that got to do with anything? Coherence and the translation of relative clauses from Chinese. In Journal of Specialised Translation (www.jostrans.org) issue 13, January 2010

Foreign Culture, Foreign Style: a Translator’s View of Modern Chinese Fiction. In Perspectives: Studies in Translatology 14(1): 13-31. (2006).

Beyond Paper Dictionaries: Mining the Web for Technical Terminology in Chinese (available from http://isg.urv.es/cttt/cttt/research.html, or on request from NH).

Visiting Fellow at the Research Centre for Translation at Chinese University Hong Kong, April 2006. Visiting Scholar, Fudan University and Beijing University, China, 2008.

 

Nicky's sample translations:

 

November 2008

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Call for contributions to the JoSTrans journal

JoSTrans, The Journal of Specialised Translation, will publish a special issue on translation and Chinese issues in 2010. While the blurb says it focusses on non-literary translation, past issues have ranged very broadly, and no doubt this one will too, given the special nature of Chinese to English translation. I'm always struck by the thoughtful and inspiring (sometimes amusing!) discussions on translation issues on Paper Republic. So if some of you contributors feel inspired to turn your thoughts into an article, click more below, for information.

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By Nicky Harman, November 27, 1:33a.m.

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Some problems with the Man Asian Literary Prize

I was interested in a recent article by Richard Lea of the UK's Guardian newspaper, on the 2008 Man Asia Literary Prize, won this year by a Philipino writer, Miguel Syjuco, and last year by Jiang Rong with Wolf Totem. I've pasted in the article below, but first, my own comment:
In all the discussions on the prize, I think two key points have been missed. One is practical and the other 'conceptual': to get an English language version which has not been published (for the books which originate in languages other than English), you need a translator to spend a year of their time translating a book for nothing, in the hopes that a publisher will pop up later - or you need the publisher of the translation and the translator to do a deal whereby the book is submitted for the prize after the translation deal has been done, but before the book is actually published. That immediately disadvantages the non-English language books in the competition for this prize. On a broader level, the prize is awarded on the basis of the translation to the original author. The problem is that the original and the translation are two separate versions, albeit of the same book. We all know that a good translation can 'improve' a book, and a bad translation can ruin a good book. What about Paper Republic readers' views?

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By Nicky Harman, November 20, 6:15a.m.

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