City Translations

[XiaoMa]

Hello

does anyone have a list or method of(for) translating(-ted) city names in Europe? Is there a chinese system to learn how to translate these european/world names of cities?

Thank you for your help

Xiaoma

[geraldc]

I think the best way is just to get a Chinese atlas and study the names.

There doesn't seem to be consistent way of naming. Sometimes they use transliteration, and sometimes the meaning of the name is translated.

[skylee]

One way is to google the name of the city using chinese search engines like www.google.com.hk or www.google.com.tw or www.yahoo.com.hk. Choose "all chinese webpages" (所有中文網頁) and you may find the translation somewhere. For example, I googled "rothenburg" and on the third page of the results I found "羅騰堡".

Also take a look at this thread -> http://www.chinese-forums.com/viewtopic.php?t=1416

There are national standards on "外国地名汉字译写导则" ("Transformation guidelines of geographical names from foreign languages into Chinese") for English, French, German, Russian, etc. I suppose they can be bought from the Standardization Administration of China.

The national standards are -

> GB/T 17693.1-1999 Transformation guidelines of geographical names from foreign languages into Chinese--English

> GB/T 17693.2-1999 Transformation guidelines of geographical names from foreign languages into Chinese--French

> GB/T 17693.3-1999 Transformation guidelines of geographical names from foreign languages into Chinese--Germany

> GB/T 17693.4-1999 Transformation guidelines of geographical names from foreign languages into Chinese--Russian

> GB/T 17693.5-1999 Transformation guidelines of geographical names from foreign languages into Chinese--Spanish

> GB/T 17693.6-1999 Transformation guidelines of geographical names from foreign languages into Chinese--Arabic

[roddy]

Add the name of the country in Chinese, and you get it on the first page. Course, if you aren't familiar with the characters it'd be hard to spot . . .

Roddy

[Taibei]

does anyone have a list or method of(for) translating(-ted) city names in Europe? Is there a chinese system to learn how to translate these european/world names of cities?

There is no one method. See Transliteration of Foreign Place Names and Personal Names.

[trevelyan]

Foreign names in Chinese are usually "spelled-out" using a subset of "phonetic" characters, so it isn't uncommon for a single name to have multiple translations; San Francisco has at least three. I use a subset of characters as phonetic markers.

三藩市 San Francisco

三蕃市 San Francisco

旧金山 San Francisco

There are specialized print dictionaries devoted to collecting geographic names, but it may be difficult to find them outside of China. I've been tagging city names for a while for my annotator and have about 300 cities you are welcome to use. Mandarinboy provides a great online dictionary with a searchable interface that might be helpful. As Roddy suggests, Google is probably best for the rest.

If you end up compiling a list for whatever purpose, please consider submitting it to one of the projects that collects and tags this data. I'd be happy to get any new entries, and I'm sure others would too.

Best,

--david