|
Transcription into Chinese refers to the use of traditional or simplified characters to communicate the ''sound'' of terms and names foreign to Chinese. (Communicating the ''meaning'' of such words is translation into Chinese.) Since, in both mainland China and Taiwan, Hanyu Pinyin is now used to transcribe Chinese into a modified Latin alphabet and since English classes are now standard in most secondary schools, it is increasingly common to see foreign names and terms left in their original form in Chinese texts. However, for mass media and marketing within China and for non-European languages, particularly those of the Chinese minorities, transcription into characters remains very common. Despite the importance of Cantonese and other southern coastal varieties of Chinese to foreign contact during the 19th century (as seen, for instance, in the number of Cantonese loanwords in English), the northern capital dialect has been formally sanctioned within the country for centuries. This status continued under the Republic, which retained the importance of the "National Language" (, ''Guóyǔ'') despite moving its capital to Nanking, Chungking, and Taipei, none of which natively spoke it. Similarly, "Standard Chinese" (, ''Pǔtōnghuà'') has been mandatory for most media and education throughout the People's Republic of China since 1956.〔Lam S.L., Agnes. ''Language Education in China: Policy and Experience from 1949'', p. 39. Hong Kong Univ. Press (Hong Kong), 2005.〕〔Guo Zhenzhi. ''Mapping Media in China: Region, Province, and Locality''. "Dialects and Local Media: The Cases of Kunming and Yunnan TV", (p. 49 ). Accessed 6 November 2013.〕 Except for a handful of traditional exceptions, modern transcription therefore uses the standardized Mandarin pronunciations exclusively. ==Official standards== Modern Han Chinese consists of about 412 syllables〔Chinese Wiktionary's pinyin index〕 in 5 tones, so homophones abound and most non Han words have multiple possible transcriptions. This is particularly true since Chinese is written as monosyllabic logograms, and consonant clusters foreign to Chinese must be broken into their constituent sounds (or omitted), despite being thought of as a single unit in their original language. Since there are so many characters to choose from when transcribing a word, a translator can manipulate the transcription to add additional meaning. In the People's Republic of China, the process has been standardized by the Proper Names and Translation Service of the Xinhua News Agency. Xinhua publishes an official reference guide, the ''Names of the World's Peoples: a Comprehensive Dictionary of Names in Roman-Chinese'' (, ''Shìjiè Rénmíng Fānyì Dà Cídiǎn''), which controls most transcription for official media and publication in mainland China. As the name implies, the work consists of a dictionary of common names. It also includes transcription tables for names and terms which are not included. The English table is reproduced below; those for a number of other languages are available at the . The Basic Laws of the Hong Kong and Macau Special Administrative Regions provide that "Chinese" will be the official languages of those territories, in addition to English and Portuguese, respectively, leaving ambiguous the relative preference for Mandarin and Cantonese. In practice, transcriptions based on both Cantonese and Mandarin pronunciations have been used. In Singapore, transcription standards are established by the Translation Standardisation Committee for the Chinese Media. Increasingly, other countries are setting their own official standards for Chinese transcription and do not necessarily follow Xinhua's versions, just as Xinhua's version differs from Wade-Giles and other international standards. For example, the United States renders "Obama" as “欧巴马”，based on the American pronunciation, while Xinhua uses “奥巴马”。 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Transcription into Chinese characters」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|