No idea about Lianke, but I’ve been learning French, and reading translations of novels from English has given a bit of perspective I missed when limited to the

No idea about Lianke, but I’ve been learning French, and reading translations of novels from English has given a bit of perspective I missed when limited to the ones into English. Harry Potter comes through just great: nuances tend to be preserved as far as I can tell at my level, wordplay becomes wordplay, the Sorting Hat song is still singable and even rhymes. OTOH one translation of Alice In Wonderland was super-bad, ranging from very literal to misunderstanding the source. You’d come away thinking it was pointless nonsense. It’d be very hard to translate well, of course, and impossible to make anything exactly equivalent, but this particular attempt was just a waste of time. So cases like this exist. Asimov’s Foundation and Empire also suffered, which surprised me some since I’d picked it as a source that’s not too literary, easy to translate faithfully. Looking up reviews of it in French, none ever remarked on the quality of the translation (or lack thereof). They seemed to just assume Asimov was like that. Still, the story was not much mangled, it was mostly just the prose style. I’m more cynical now about translations — the published stuff varies more in quality than I’d appreciated — but it can still be very good. Someone else will have to chime in about Chinese literary fiction.