Essays on Writing and Language in Honor - Sino-Platonic Papers

Sino-Platonic Papers, 27 (August 3 1, 199 1)
3.3.5 Three Principles in the rans slat ion of Foreign Words and
Symbols: In order to get rid of various contradictions caused by
Chinese characters, to improve our documentation work, and to
promote international exchange, it is necessary to work out some
regulations with respect to the translation of foreign words and
symbols.
As for personal names and place-names it is reasonable to
adopt transliteration mode. In fact, it would simply be coping
word by word on account of the similarity between Chinese Pinyin
and English alphabets. In dealing with the personal names and
place names from Cyrillic or other alphabets the ISols romanized
transliteration schemes should be adopted.
As to terms derived from personal names or place names, they
must be treated in different way, for they have been converted
into Chinese vocabulary as soon as they were introduced. It means
in more concrete terms that equal attention must be paid to both
pronunciation and configuration. For instance, the letter
with pronunciation as [kl should be converted to "kM, and "phn to
"fq1; and some consonant clusters should be reduced or infixed
with a vowel, etc.* As the author and his assistant have
suggested, it is advisable to write "Mendelev zhouqibiao
(periodic table) in Pinyin instead of "Mendeleev zhouqibiaom and
to write ltKarington ziwuxian (meridian)" instead of "Carrington
ziwuxianw, etc. In a word, we have to make the foreign words more
convenient for pronunciation, and keep the original configuration
as far as possible for the purpose of being in concert with the
original names.
The transplanation of individual terms should be carried out
in a specific way. As we have said before, the pure terms should
be transcribed phonetically with the aid of Pinyin. How should
the phonetic transcription be carried out? As the term is an
important of our vocabulary and will take root and blossom after
its transplanation, so it has to be sinicized. Linguistically
speaking, neither transcription nor transliteration alone will
do; a compromise* proposal should be adopted. In other words, more
attention must be paid to the phonetic similarity and less
attention to the configurative similarity. For example,
spectrography --> spektogafy; adstringent -->adestinjin or
adestingen.
3.3.6 The Necessity of a Transcription-based Transliteration
Scheme: Many people have noticed the inefficiency of Chinese
characters in the transcription of foreign personal names and
place-names and have long advocated the insertion of Pinyin
words. People have also noticed the superiority of phonetic
loanwords to sema'ntic ones in the field of pure terms and have
therefore advocated a phonetic approach. All of these are good
propositions, but how shall we realize them? These propositions
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* Liu Yongquan and Qiao Yi, A Tentative Study of Transcription-
based Transliteration. (in press)