Nicky Harman

Literary translator.

London, UK

contact

Nicky Harman lives in the UK and works as a literary translator as well as giving occasional talks and running workshops on translation. She has just (December 2011) completed a three-month stint as the London Free Word Centre’s Translator-in-Residence.

Upcoming Work:

two short stories for Comma Press "Tales from Ten Cities" series, by Han Dong and Ding Liying, 2012

Novel by Yan Geling, Flowers of Nanjing as filmed by Zhang Yimou, to be published by Chatto and Windus, January 2012

Anthology of poems by Han Dong, to be published by Zephyr Press, January 2012

Published Translations:

Prize-winning novel Gold Mountain Blues/Jin Shan by Zhang Ling, published by Penguin Canada and Atlantic Books (UK).

Short stories for Ou Ning's Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture, 2009, and literary magazine Chutzpah, 2010 and 2011.

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.

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:

 

April 2009

all posts

Paper Republic and Han Dong in London – 2

On Thursday 23 April we organised East meets West: Authors Talking to Authors - the most ambitious of our events in London. For the film of the event, click here. We brought together four authors, three based in the UK and one Chinese author – Han Dong, and to talk about writing, in a bookshop in Central London (Oxfam Bookshop, 91 Marylebone High Street, for you Londoners). It was to be a cross-cultural sort of discussion and we were aiming at a general audience, the sort of person who loves books but hasn't any specialist knowledge of 'world literature'.

East meets West
From left: Aamer Hussein, Xinran, Richard Lea

More…

By Nicky Harman, April 26, 5:34a.m.

1 comment

London Book Fair

Well, Eric and I have ‘done’ the London Book Fair, all three days of it, met 14 publishers, contributed to two seminars, drunk innumerable cups of coffee… and survived (just) to tell the tale. We did a short presentation to each publisher on what Paper Republic had to offer them, and listened to what they had to say about publishing Chinese books in translation. It was interesting that different publishers were looking for different kinds of books. (Encouragingly, a few are prepared to consider 'literary fiction’, the brilliantly written work, even though most of them said that what sells well is the main consideration.)

In a nutshell, they reinforced what we already knew:

  1. There’s a lot of interest out there in Chinese fiction, but few books actually make it into translation – and that isn’t going to change fast.
  2. The fact that most publishers can't read the texts in the original and contact the authors direct is a huge barrier.

More…

By Nicky Harman, April 23, 5:21a.m.

8 comments