Jia Pingwa is arguably the only contemporary Chinese novelist who compares favorably to Mo Yan in terms of literary reputation, quality, and prolificacy. In effect, debates regarding whether Mo or Jia is the leading novelist in contemporary Chinese literature never ceased before Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2012 and still persistently remain so as far as Chinese readers and critics are concerned. Not a small number of Chinese critics argue that the very reason that Jia Pingwa has been slow to attract international attention lies in the fact that his works haven't been consistently translated into English the way Mo Yan's works have. The bulk of Mo Yan's works were translated by Howard Goldblatt by 2012, which contributes enormously to his reception in the world and accordingly to his Nobel Prize.In contrast, only one of Jia's major novels, Turbulence, originally published in China in 1987, was translated by Goldblatt into English in 1991, which immediately won Jia the Pegasus Prize for Literature the same year, but it wasn't until fifteen years later that another of Jia's major novels, and perhaps his most controversial, Ruined City, originally published in 2003, was translated by Goldblatt and published in 2016. The urgency and necessity of translating Jia's works into English has never been more keenly felt than after Mo Yan's Nobel Award, and recent years have witnessed consistent translation of Jia's three novels, one of which is Ji Hua (2016), translated as Broken Wings (2019) by Nicky Harman.Nicky Harman is a UK-based translator of contemporary Chinese literature. Of the ten Chinese writers she has translated, such as Anni Baobei, Han Dong, Xu Xiaobin, Xu Zhiyuan, and Yan Ge, to name just a few, Jia Pingwa is the only major novelist. Jia's Gao Xing (2007) was previously translated by Harman as Happy Dreams (2017). In Broken Wings, Jia draws attention to the great impact of urbanity on the country. The story is told in the first person by a young woman called Butterfly, who is kidnapped and sold as a bride to a young man in a remote village where young men cannot find wives because most young women have left for the city.The emphasis of the story is not human trafficking as the author makes clear in the afterword, “I did not want to write the story of a simple kidnap … What I wanted to explore was how the cities grew fat while the villages fell into destitution …” (Jia, Broken 226) However, one must admit that compared with his contemporaries, Jia's works are more difficult to translate, which is perhaps one of the reasons that Goldblatt switched to focus on Mo Yan's works after Turbulence (1991). The difficulty of Jia's works seems to be a major factor that has intimidated potential translators and consequently delayed international transmission of his works for almost two decades. In translating Broken Wings, Harman's biggest challenge arises from Shaanxi dialect and Shaanxi folk culture.To begin with, Jia comes from Southern Shaanxi, and he speaks and writes only in Shaanxi dialect. He never speaks Mandarin, which, in Chinese, literally means “common language.” Mo Yan commented positively on Jia's dialect at a conference: Pingwa once said that only common people speak common language. Did Chairman Mao speak common language? Did Premier Zhou speak common language? They didn't speak common language. In this light, we must say Jia Pingwa is a great writer because he doesn't speak common language. On a personal note, I consider the relationship between Shaanxi dialect and his writing a valuable research topic. (47) Although Shaanxi dialect is not entirely different from Mandarin, not a small number of terms, concepts, expressions, and slangs can only be understood by a Shaanxi local. For this reason, Jia's works are difficult, to varying degrees, even for domestic readers who are not from Shaanxi, not to mention English translators. Harman did actually mention the difficulty of translating dialect in Happy Dreams in 2017: As I launched into the translation, I discovered a whole series of challenges that I had somehow failed to anticipate. First and foremost, I had to understand the dialect, I mean really understand it, not just well enough to read and enjoy the novel…the Xi'an dialect also conspired to make it hard to understand what was going on. (Asian Books Blog, 2017) Here “the dialect” and “Xi'an dialect” both refer to Shaanxi dialect. Broken Wings, without exception, is written in Shaanxi dialect and the difficulty Harman encounters in Happy Dreams continues in Broken Wings, directly resulting in not a small number of mistakes in her translation. In the original text, for instance, “只说” (45) means “I thought” while Harman translates it as “I said” (43); “胡扑” (64) means “bum around” while Harman translates it literally as “flap around” (66); “躁”(39) means “restless” while Harman misunderstands it as “thirsty” (36), to list just a few. Apart from the phrases, a great number of Shaanxi proverbs, slangs as well as folk songs, have caused serious problems with her translation.The latter part of the novel is full of folk songs sung or articulated by an old woman who is good at paper-cutting. Take Harman's translation of one of the folk songs for example: “He's a fixer for everything. / He ploughs his furrow far and wide, / He blows his trumpet loud and clear, / He fills a donkey muzzle with piss” (164). This four-line folk song is the old woman's comment on the village head that he is a brazen braggart. Except for the last line, Harman mistranslates the first three lines which are filled with imagery of country life and which she obviously has a lot of trouble understanding.Here I offer my translation of the folk song in order to display how Harman's translation strays from the original text: “He can throw chicken feathers far away, / He can pull the arch of the plough straight, / He can blow up a piece of cow hide, / He can fill up the donkey muzzle with piss.” This folk song, similar to many other folk songs in the novel, is full of humorous imagery and piercing sarcasm for the purpose of criticism or/and illumination. The folk songs are more difficult to translate, for they are a combination of Shaanxi dialect and social criticism which is only indirectly conveyed. As a literary translator myself and as someone from Central Shaanxi, I'm well aware of the great challenges Harman must have faced in wrestling with the dialect.Harman's next challenge concerns Shaanxi folk culture. Shaanxi dialect is the carrier of Shaanxi culture, and Jia's works are a kaleidoscope of Shaanxi folk culture. Shaanxi, currently one of the 23 provinces in China, with Xi'an as its capital city, consists of three areas: Northern Shaanxi, Central Shaanxi, and Southern Shaanxi, and yao culture is the very thing that makes Northern Shaanxi well-known. In Broken Wings, the author sets the story in Northern Shaanxi, which features the famous yao culture. Yao is the traditional housing architecture of Loess Plateau in the northwestern part of China, scattered in provinces such as Shanxi, Shaanxi, Henan, Gansu, and Ningxia, which indicates people's creativity and wisdom in adapting to the plateau environment and is regarded as a type of green architecture. The reason that yao culture is considered as an indispensable part of traditional Chinese culture lies in the fact that yao is “the earliest underground housing design, which can be traced back to over 4500 years ago” (Wang, 194).As an environmentally friendly housing design, “Yao is the historical heritage of Chinese civilization and continues to play a unique part in people's life today” (Kang, 56). Furthermore, yao is the central image of yao culture which also involves kang, window lattice, millstones, papercutting, and folksongs, and which strings together the overall story in the novel. Therefore, a thorough comprehension of yao culture is indispensable to any English translators. According to Red Star Over China (2005), Edgar Snow stayed in Pao An, Northern Shaanxi, for a short period in the 1930s and he wrote about the representative housing architecture in which Chairman Mao used to live: The Reds were putting up some new buildings in Pao An, but accommodations were very primitive while I was there. Mao lived with his wife in a two-room yao-fang with bare, poor, map-covered walls. He had known much worse, and as the son of a “rich” peasant in Hunan he has also known better. The Maos' chief luxury (like Chou's) was a mosquito net. (113) Notice that Snow employs “yao-fang” to describe the architecture, “fang” being the pinyin (Chinese pronunciation) for “house.” Obviously, Snow then considered “yao” as a type of “house” and accordingly coined a compound word “yao-fang” to depict the architecture. Snow was neither prejudiced against yao, nor did he regard Yao as a symbol of poverty despite that people back in the 1930s did live under harsh conditions in Northern Shaanxi. Harman, to one's surprise, simply translates yao as “cave,” which seems to me her most serious mistake. The word “cave” is rather misleading in that English readers are very likely to associate “cave” with the cavemen in The Croods (2016) in which the pre-historic humans were living in a cave. Even in today's context, “yao” is still a symbol of civilization in Chinese culture while “cave” too easily reminds one of primitive society and barbarity, and I doubt that English readers will understand yao culture properly through the “cave.”Furthermore, what Harman changes most about the novel is the paragraph structure. Jia is meticulous about the arrangement of paragraphs, which leaves one the impression that there seems to be a hidden logic behind each paragraph he carefully arranges, while in Harman's translation, she takes liberty to reorganize the paragraphs. Her guiding principle seems to indicate that she almost always restarts a paragraph whenever she encounters a dialogue in the middle of a paragraph, but there are also times when she rearranges a paragraph which does not involve any dialogue. As a result, Harman has largely reshaped the structure of the whole novel, including even the author's afterword, by steadily following her principle. Take the beginning of the novel, for example: EVENING.I made my one hundred and seventy-eighth scratch on the cave wall.The roosting crows spattered shit all over the ground.Good-Son's dad topped himself.And I got to know Great-Grandad. (1) In the original text, the above paragraphs are actually the content of the first paragraph, and if I were to restore the original style, the translation might look something like this: That evening, I made my one hundred and seventy-eighth scratch on the cave wall. The roosting crows spattered shit all over the ground. Good-Son's dad topped himself. And I got to know Great-Grandad. The content of Harman's translation and my rearrangement barely differs while the latter better conforms to the original structure. In the original text, the second paragraph consists of 17 lines while Harman divides it into five separate paragraphs. One must admit that Harman's strategy of reorganizing the paragraphs damages, to a considerable degree, the fiber and logic of the original text.Literature is the essence of culture, and it is needless to say that literary translation plays a critical role in crosscultural communication. However, literary translation presents huge challenges to translators when it comes to rendering culture. The linguistic and cultural challenges Harman encounters force one to consider whether Chinese scholars' participation in the process of translation may contribute to the quality of translation, for even Goldblatt has received constant advice and help from his wife Sylvia Li-chun Lin, who has cotranslated a great number of books with him. In fact, most of Harman's mistranslations in Broken Wings could have been avoided had she been aided by some Chinese scholar who is familiar with Shaanxi dialect and culture. As a passionate and dedicated translator of contemporary Chinese literature, though Harman's translation of Broken Wings might not be as satisfactory, her efforts and courage are highly admired and respected.