Chinese URL's

[JustJon]

I have question regarding how Chinese web addresses work:

What needs to be typed into the address bar to access a website from within China?

What do the Chinese use for things like "http" "/" "." and "www"?

When web addresses are quoted in printed publications how are they quoted?

Thanks.

[geraldc]

Web addresses in China are the same as the rest of the world's

[JustJon]

So Chinese URL's use things like back slashes and dots to separate the address like in western URL's?

What characters are used for http and www?

[geraldc]

HTML is the same all over the world! There is no Chinese specific version of HTML. A Chinese website is the same as any other website, but perhaps ending in .cn

[JustJon]

I'm shocked at that, please forgive me for my ignorance, I just assumed that to access a site in a country that uses a non-roman alphabet, the address could be entered using the characters that that country uses.

So when URL's are advertised they're always written in roman alphabet?

What do Chinese companies do about their web address when the company name can't be directly translated to English?

[geraldc]

I'm shocked at that' date=' please forgive me for my ignorance, I just assumed that to access a site in a country that uses a non-roman alphabet, the address could be entered using the characters that that country uses.

So when URL's are advertised they're always written in roman alphabet?

What do Chinese companies do about their web address when the company name can't be directly translated to English?[/quote']

They use pinyin. Everything in Mandarin can be written using the western alphabet, in fact I think kids are taught using the western alphabet before they start learning Chinese characters.

[liuzhou]

Have a look at this .

[zhwj]

I'm shocked at that, please forgive me for my ignorance, I just assumed that to access a site in a country that uses a non-roman alphabet, the address could be entered using the characters that that country uses.

That's the idea behind the internationalization domain names, but it's still just getting started. There's a Consortium working on it.

I don't think the http:// will be converted to Chinese, if only because no one really types it in the address bar these days, anyway. Punctuation is the same, except for 。, which needs browser enhancements to work.

Check out this writeup for a synopsis of the current state of Hanzi domain names.

[JustJon]

So what would you say is standard practice for a website placing it's name/logo/url on a web page?

Sina for instance:

http://www.sina.com.cn/

The name uses the western alphabet and then what I presume is the Chinese translation above it. Does the translation just say Sina or does it say sina.com.cn?

[TSkillet]

it's not actually a translation at all. the two characeters (新浪) mean "New Wave" - what it says above sinc.com.cn is "new wave web"

[JustJon]

I'm a bit confused. Am I right in thinking that most Chinese sites for western brands use the text of the brand name (using western alphabet) as normal, with the addition of the name translated into Chinese? Is this what Yahoo have done? http://cn.yahoo.com/

Is this a direct translation? Does 雅虎中国 exactly mean yahoo?

Do most Chinese brands do the opposite and use Chinese characters for the main logo and then use a pinyin translation as part of the logo to display the web address? Or, are only western letters used as with Sina?

Please help my head is hurting now.

[geraldc]

Sometimes names are transliterated, and sometimes they are translated, there is no hard and fast rule. In Yahoo's case they transliterated. 雅虎 meaning Yahoo/yahu and 中国 meaning China/Zhongguo

[roddy]

Just spotted a Chinese domain in Google's results url, which I've never seen before. Seems to be a reseller, and it redirects to a 'normal' domain name, but that's the first time I've noticed Chinese characters in Google's urls.