Han Dong, an avantgarde poet, novelist and essayist from Jiangsu.[Photo provided to China Daily]

Cultural gap

In addition to Mandarin being a difficult language to master, the translator says her work is also made complicated by cultural gaps.

For example, she says, Women Jia, or My Family, by Yan Ge, a young writer born in 1984 in Chengdu, southwest Sichuan province, was difficult to translate because it deals with a Chinese family dynamic different from those in the West.

"I found the family relationship in the novel difficult to understand, and lots of dialogue was also incredibly difficult, although Yan is a fantastically funny and sharp writer," Harman says.

The novel features a domineering 80-year-old matriarch who forces her children to marry in the hope of boosting the family's fortunes. "The mother and her children are horrible to each other, but in very subtle ways, which is difficult to convey in English," she says.

To ensure accuracy, Harman asks Yan to help with the dialect used in the book and explain the relationships to her.

Equally challenging are Han's novels and poetry, she says, as he uses beautiful words so they needed to be translated beautifully.

"As a translator I need to be a chameleon," she tells Chinese students at the London workshop.

Having a good editor is also vital, she adds. "The translator is the author's first reader and is the closest to their work, and the editor is the translator's first reader and can ask us to think again and tell us where the translated work is not clear."

She says the best time to correct a work is three months after the translation, so as to get some distance from the work and view it with fresh eyes.