CZ:Romanization/Chinese

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This is a draft recommendation on how to romanize Chinese words and names within Citizendium. It is not official Citizendium policy. You may edit this as you would any other page within this site. Discussion of the issues should take place on the Talk page.

Scope

Here we are discussing transliteration of Chinese script (both simplified and traditional script) known in Chinese as Hanzi (漢字 or 汉字). Scripts used by ethnic groups in China that different form Hanzi (such as Mongolian script or Manchurian script) can be discussed on their own pages.

Definition of the issue

Chinese text, written in Chinese script, is illegible to most English speaking people. When discussing topics relating to China or Chinese issues, we need to write the Chinese words using the Roman alphabet. Chinese words have more than one pronunciation, with various dialects of Chinese spoken in different regions. There is more than one way established way to transliterate each dialect. In addition, political situations in China have lead to certain sections of the Chinese community favouring one for of transliteration over another. In order to avoid confusion, Citizendium should be consistent in its method or Romanization. In order to avoid bias, the point of view of various political factions must be considered in a balanced manner.

Transcribe and transliterate not translate

This page will describe how to change text from Chinese script to Roman script. The resultant text will still be in the Chinese language. How to translate from Chinese to English or other languages is irrelevant to this page and may be discussed elsewhere.

Romanization not Anglicization

The objective is to map Chinese language to Roman script; it is not intended to allow those who can read Roman script, but do not know Chinese, to produce an accurate pronunciation. There are sounds in English that do not exist in Chinese and vice-versa; thus, some characters will be pronounced differently in romanized Chinese from their standard English pronunciation. Different forms of romanization map the extra sounds in different ways.

English or Chinese choice irrelevant

It is not our objective here to decide on wither to use English names for Chinese things or English names. We are not deciding whither to use 'Confucius' or 'Kǒng Fūzǐ' here. Instead we are discussing wither 孔夫子 transcribes as Kǒng Fūzǐ (Pinyin) or K'ung-fu-tzu (Wade-Giles) or something else. The discussion as to whither to choose Anglicized names or Chinese names can be done else where. Here we will concentrate only on how to write the Chinese name in Chinese using Roman script.

Information

Main established methods of Romanization

There are established transliteration methods for most dialects of Chinese.

Mandarin (Pǔtōnghuà)

This is the majority dialect of Chinese. Even where Mandarin is not the main dialect, a significant proportion of Chinese speaking people will have it as a second language. The established transliteration methods for Mandarin Chinese are:

• Hanyu Pinyin (ISO standard)
• EFEO
• Gwoyeu Romatzyh
• Latinxua Sin Wenz
• Mandarin Phonetic Symbols II
• Chinese Postal Map Romanization
• Tongyong Pinyin
• Wade-Giles
• Mandarin Yale
• Legge Romanization
• Simplified Wade

Cantonese

• Guangdong Romanization
• Hong Kong Government
• Jyutping
• Meyer-Wempe
• Sidney Lau
• S. L. Wong (phonetic symbols)
• S. L. Wong (romanisation)
• Standard Cantonese Pinyin
• Standard Romanization
• Cantonese Yale
• Barnett-Chao

Wu

• Long-short (Romanization)

Min Nan

Taiwanese, Amoy, and related

• Pe̍h-oē-jī

Hainanese

• Hainanhua Pinyin Fang'an

Teochew

• Peng'im

Min Dong: Fuzhou dialect

• Foochow Romanized

Hakka

Moiyan dialect

• Kejiahua Pinyin Fang'an

Siyen dialect

• Phak-fa-sṳ

Policy (Draft)

Selection

The following can be used to select a preferred transliteration method. It does not forbid using multiple or alternative transliterations where appropriate, but rather insists that one form of transliteration should be preferred or that one transliteration should be preferentially positioned or ordered.

Topics that transcend regional or dialect boundaries

Primary preference: Hànyǔ Pīnyīn: Default to the largest region and dialect groups preference. For Chinese the largest region is the PRC and the largest dialect is Mandarin. The preferred form of transliteration here is Hanyu Pinyin.

Secondary preference: Wade-Giles: this can be given after the Pinyin if known, but is not required, unless the Wade-Giles transliteration was at one time well known, and widely used, and therefore likely to be found in older books, e.g. the Ch'ing dynasty.

Tertiary preference: Other forms may be given as secondary or tertiary transliterations if space permits but are not necessary, again, unless they were at one time well known, and widely used: e.g., the former standardized international postal spellings of cities such as Peking and Chungking.

Avoid using: To be added.

Topics specific to a region

Where the topic of the transliteration concerns a specified region, preference should be given to that region's usual transliteration method. For example, the transliteration of the name of the Mayor of Beijing is specific to the PRC and so Singapore transliteration preferences are irrelevant to that topic.

People's Republic of China

Primary preference: Hànyǔ Pīnyīn: As Mandarin is the majority and official language in this region we should default to Hanyu Pinyin first.

Secondary preference: This depends on whither the topic is specific to a particular dialect. If a non Mandarin dialect is relevant to the topic then it should be given in addition to Hanyu Pinyin according to the dialect specific rules below.

Tertiary preference: Wade-Giles and this should be given after the Pinyin if known but is not required. Other forms may be given as secondary or tertiary transliterations if space permits but are not necessary.

Avoid using: To be added.

Topics specific to a dialect

Regional preferences should override dialect preferences. However, where regional and dialect specific transliterations differ, the dialect specific transliteration may be given as a secondary form.

Mandarin

Primary preference: Hanyu Pinyin

Secondary preference: Wade-Giles

Style guides

Just as English people require style guides when writing English, guides are also useful for transliterated text. The following style guides provide a consistent formate to Citizendium pages where the transliteration method states no preference.

Hanyu Pinyin

Word Spacing

No direction is given in pinyin as to how and where to space words. Some writes only put spaces between sentences, others put one space for each and every character of Chinese script. The first produces text that is almost unreadable and the second ignores the meaning of the script. Many words in Chinese consist of two and a few consist of three characters together. Where the two characters are inseparable in the Chinese, they should be joined in the pinyin. Where the characters represent separate ideas (words) they should be spaces in the pinyin.

Disambiguating

Occasionally, a word in pinyin can be ambiguous as it's not clear where the two parts of the word split. For example.... In these cases, a apostrophe should be used to mark the split point an make the meaning unambiguous.

Tone marks

The use of the correct tone is very important in Chinese pronunciation. If the tone marks are omitted, the pronunciation and meaning of word may be unclear. For example the word 'ma' with no tone marked could mean 'mother' or it could mean 'horse'.

Where the transliteration is used for the first time in the article, the tone should be correctly marked. Ideally the tone should be marked on every use but may be omitted as long as the first instance is marked and not ambiguity exists in the text.

Tones should be marked using accent marks above the vowels in the word.

Other Style Guides

The Library of Congress has published online a number of documents relating to its conversion-to-pinyin project that might be useful to consult; see http://www.loc.gov/catdir/pinyin/ . Like many libraries, however, the Library of Congress's rules about word separation go very far in the direction of putting a space after every individual syllable -- which is useful for library cataloging, but not generally used by scholars and other translators in other contexts.

There is a very detailed set of rules on the more standard (in the non-library-catalog context) method of dividing words and combining syllables into words at http://www.pinyin.info/readings/zyg/rules.html . It is a chapter from the book The Historical Evolution of Chinese Languages and Scripts by Zhou Youguang, published by Ohio State University.