Literary translator.
London, UK
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.
"With the PRC now in its swaggering 60s, I would prescribe – to counter the excesses of Beijing bombast – a stiff dose of Lu Xun", Julia concludes in this June 12th 2010 article on the relevance of Lu Xun to contemporary China, in the (UK) Guardian newspaper.
By Nicky Harman, June 13, 7:32a.m.
Thinking Chinese Translation is a practical and comprehensive course-book, intended for translation students and of interest to practising translators too.
By Nicky Harman, June 10, 9:21a.m.
Pamela Hunt writes: Why are there so many modern Chinese novels in which, as Cindy Carter put it so nicely in an earlier post, ‘faeces play a starring role’? Any reader of contemporary Chinese fiction will tell you that you don’t have to look very far to find a joke about bodily functions. But at the same time humour is rarely discussed in academic writing on Chinese literature, let alone humour that centres around the toilet. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed a shame, which is why I decided to tackle the subject myself in a recent essay for the MA in Modern Chinese Literature at SOAS, University of London, focusing on the work of two authors much discussed on the pages of Paper Republic, Han Dong and Zhu Wen.
By Nicky Harman, June 2, 10:31a.m.