Транскрипция иностранных слов в китайском языке

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Transcription into Chinese characters is the use of traditional or simplified Chinese characters to phonetically transcribe the sound of terms and names of foreign words to the Chinese language. Transcription is distinct from translation into Chinese whereby the meaning of a foreign word is communicated in Chinese. 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. Except for a handful of traditional exceptions, most modern transcription in Mainland China uses the standardized Mandarin pronunciations exclusively.

Modern Han Chinese consists of about 412 syllables 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. As an example, for the syllable jī, there is a choice of some 120 characters that have this as a Hanyu Pinyin reading. In the People's Republic of China, the process has been standardized by the Proper Names and Translation Service of the state run Xinhua News Agency. Xinhua publishes an official reference guide, the Names of the World's Peoples: a Comprehensive Dictionary of Names in Roman Chinese (世界人名翻译大辞典 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 on the Chinese Wikipedia. The Basic Laws of the Hong Kong (article) and Macau (article) 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 Cantonese and Mandarin. 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 and in 2014 was moved to National Translation Committee (NTC) of the Ministry of Communication and Information. In Malaysia, transcription/translation standards are established by Chinese Language Standardisation Council of Malaysia. 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 embassy in China recommends rendering "Obama" as 欧巴马 Ōubāmǎ, while Xinhua uses 奥巴马 Àobāmǎ.

The characters now employed in standardized transcription tend to have abstract or obscure meanings and have fallen out of use, so that their phonetic use is apparent. Therefore, in many cases, the Chinese names non Chinese people adopt for themselves are not those that are phonetically equivalent but are instead "adapted" from or "inspired" by (i. e., translations of) the original. See, for instance, the Chinese names of the Hong Kong governors.

Very rarely, characters are specially made for the transcribed terms. This was formerly more common: by adding the appropriate semantic radical, existing characters could be used to give a sense of the sound of the new word. 江, for instance, was formed out of [[radical 85 (the water radical) + 工, which at the time had the sound value khong, to approximate the Yue name *Krong. Similarly, the addition of [[radical 140 (the grass radical) produced 茉莉 mòlì to translate the Sanskrit name for jasmine (malli) and [[radical 145 (clothes) was added to other characters to permit 袈裟 jiāshā, the Chinese version of Sanskrit kasaya. Another such example is 乒乓 pīngpāng the Chinese word for ping pong, in which both characters are formed by removing a stroke from the similar sounding character 兵 bīng, and at the same time, the two characters look like a net and a paddle. The most general radical for transcription is the mouth radical, which is used to transcribe not only certain foreign terms (such as 咖啡 kāfēi, "coffee"), but also terms for which no Chinese characters exist in non Mandarin varieties of Chinese (such as in Cantonese). Such phono semantic compounds make up the majority of Chinese characters, but new ones coined to communicate foreign words only infrequently reach common use today. Notable exceptions are the Chinese characters for chemical elements, which mostly consist of combining pre existing characters with the appropriate radicals, such as [[radical 84 for gases.