# bird names



## birder

I have seen transliterations using numbers for the tones, as well as accents on the vowels.  I would appreciate links to any source giving the rules and preference.  Thank you.


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## kastner

Not really, most cases will use the conventions. About the conventions, hard to tell tho


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## birder

I am sorry, I do not understand.  What conventions?  Do you have links to these conventions or standards?


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## Kwunlam

I am assuming that you are talking about the translation of (SUR-)NAMES, not the translation of ordinary words like "Violin".

In Mainland China, the editors and translators would follow the system used by 新華社. So there are a system and there are rules.

One rule is that a name is translated according to the pronunciation in name-holder's place of origin. A German name is translated according to the German pronunciation. (The only difficulty is the case for emigrants, e.g. A German scholar who migrates to the USA, or a Slavic woman who migrates to France).

The English-->Chinese Table is here
http://img117.imageshack.us/img117/2249/translationnameenglishpw8.png
I also got the German->Chinese and French->Chinese if you want. 

If you want to be sure, please check it in this book 世界人名翻譯大辭典.（上、下卷）-1993年10月第1版, published in Mainland China. 

Another rule is to take consideration to the prevalent, conventional translations. Well, this rule says nothing much at all, and helps the foreign learners probably not. It means that one should _not_ blindly translate according to the "transliteration table". 

It also means that if we translate for example a missionary's or a sinologist' name, we should refer to the actual name this missionary or sinologist takes for himself/herself. So, please do not translate "Matteo Ricci" according to the table. 

* A Hint: Try to use the Wikiipedia in Chinese as a convenient help. Unless one is working with some discipline-specific, scholarly translations, the Wikipedia in Chinese would normally suffice. 



In Taiwan, there is probably no such official systemization and unification of name-translations. 

In Hong Kong however, the editors (in some major editing houses) are following the Mainland Chinese system. 

But translations of political figures like Clinton or Bush is relatively free and contextual. There are different translations for Clinton or Bush in the three places concerned.


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## birder

Thank you so much, Kwunlam, for all the time an effort you put into your reply.  It will undoubtedly be of great assistance in my work and I will examine those links as time allows.

Actually, I am not looking for surnames in the normal sense, but rather for names of birds, which may, of course, contain surnames (Wilson's plover), geographical names (Canada goose), or neither.

We have obtained the names of many Asian birds through the website cjv-lang.  They have recently changed their transliteration from a "number" system for the tones to one of "accented vowels."

The problem is that there seems to be no transliterated list for the birds outside Asia.  I have the book that I have been told is the only world list in Chinese, "A Checklist on the Classification and Distribution of the Birds of the World" edited by Prof. Zheng Guanmei from Sceince Press in Beijing.  Nice book in Latin, English, and Chinese, but no transliteration.  We will have to find a Chinese student that can read it,  Other languages do not present the transliteration problem of Chinese.  With just a few rules, we have transliterated Russian, Hebrew, Mongolian, even Japanese Katakana, but with Chinese it's hopeless without an intimate knowledge of the written language.

We are hoping to incorporate a complete Chinese list in a future volume of "Burridge's Multilingual Dictionary of Birds of the World" being published in the UK by Cambridge Scholars Press.  The Latin, English, German, Dutch, French, and Italian volumes will be out in late spring, with some 35 other languages to follow.


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## univerio

I'm very confused. Are you referring to Pinyin or the process of translating English names to Chinese characters? If you are referring to the latter, then what do you mean by there is no transliteration in the book? Do you mean that it has a traditional name in Chinese but no name that is translated from English?


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## birder

Yes, the latter.  The book has Latin and English, of course, but the Chinese is only in characters that no one here can read or pronounce.  We would like to know the rules of transliteration once a Chinese-speaking person has given us the pronunciation.


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## univerio

So you want to be able to pronounce Chinese characters? There are no "rules" in pronunciation. Each character has a pronunciation that you will have to look up in the dictionary. These pronunciations are expressed in latin letters with accents or numbers (like you said) as Pinyin. You can use the "phonetic guide" in Word to produce Pinyin automatically, but other than that, you need to look up the dictionary.

Sorry if I still misunderstood you. Kwunlam has already posted the link to the rules of transliteration. What exactly are you looking for?


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## Kwunlam

birder said:


> Yes, the latter.  The book has Latin and English, of course, but the Chinese is only in characters that no one here can read or pronounce.  We would like to know the rules of transliteration once a Chinese-speaking person has given us the pronunciation.



If you mean the PINYIN (the pronunciation of Chinese characters), there is no such simple transliteration rules. You might need to check the dictionary one by one, or you may for example hire somebody and ask him/her write all the Pinyin out.


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## birder

Thank you all for your tips.  I guess I will have to find a Chinese speaker to read the book to us.


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## Flaminius

Hello birder,

Probably you don't have to go so far.  Here is a Web tool that converts Chinese characters into pinyin transcriptions.  The resources section of this forum has a downloadable pinyin converter too.
http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=533726

And I am sure they are still more applications out there!


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## birder

Thank you ---- we'll give that a try!


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## univerio

But, keep in mind that you will have to type into the computer for that to work (your book is on paper, isn't it?), and a common way to type is with Pinyin. You could, however, use an OCR program to scan the text into the computer, but if you have a lot of pages, then it's a big hassle.


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