DramaWiki talk:Romanization of Chinese

Pinyin names

The romanisation of Chinese listed in this article is incorrect. Hanyu Pinyin places the surname first, and following characters afterward, without a space. Hence, 高圆圆 would be Gao Yuanyuan, not Gao Yuan Yuan, which is nonstandard usage and is unrecognised in China and in Singapore. --Ahbeng 20:47, 23 Jul 2006 (EDT)

For example, searching "Mao Ze Dong" turns up 134,000 hits, while searching "Mao Zedong" turns up 2 million hits. This is because Pinyin uses the name romanisation format of the latter, not the former. --Ahbeng 00:45, 24 Jul 2006 (EDT)

Thanks for replying, actually, I intended this line to refer to any romanisation in general, not just Hanyu Pinyin, like Ng Man Tat and Lee Kuan Yew. But if for Hanyu Pinyin, methods romanisation to "Gao Yuanyuan" is much more prevalent, I won't mind having Hanyu Pinyin titled that way, but I think it makes things more complicated. --A10203040 01:21, 24 Jul 2006 (EDT)

Keep in mind that the most important aspect of DramaWiki is searching. Yes, you can apply the most critical of romanization methods to a given name. However, if many of the fans do not recognize the spelling, searching is not going to work. Also keep in mind that DramaWiki is for the English reader. Regardless of how the East romanizes a name, the romanization used on DramaWiki must be western friendly, where most of the English readers come from. Ahbeng is looking at romanization purely on an academic point-of-view, which may be correct for an encyclopedia like Wikipedia. BUT, DramaWiki is NOT an encyclopedia. Therefore, all names should be entered using the most popular spelling among the fans. Also, DramaWiki encourages readers to use Google and Yahoo! to search DramaWiki, both of which offer better search facilities for pages that have been scraped by these search engines. Once these modified pages become cached on Google, a westerner looking up "Zhang Zi Yi" isn't going to find her on DramaWiki. DramaWiki is not going to take the position of trying to instruct the rest of the Internet world how to properly romanize Chinese. Let Wikipedia deal with that problem. Groink 18:45, 24 Jul 2006 (EDT)

How about I do the following, if no one replies soon, I'll move the page titles back to the split name format. The conventioned Hanyu Pinyin can be placed in the Name: line instead. I'll add a line on that in the guidelines as well.--A10203040 20:17, 24 Jul 2006 (EDT)

A10203040, before you do anything major, I would recommend you test several of the more popular names on Google and see what produces more hits. For example, test both "zhang zi yi" and "zhang ziyi" (place both of them in quotations when performing the searches.) Do a good sample size of maybe 20 names or so. With this type of data collected, it'll give you some proof you can stand behind when do you make any changes and policies. I did this with the Japanese artists, and there I've found that the majority of fans use many different methods of romaji (hepburn, wapuro, a combination of both, etc.) This is why my number-1 criteria in the romanization of Japanese is to use the most popular romanized name - regardless of what's academically correct. Simply put, I'm not going to tell the hundreds of thousands of Western people that the spelling of Itoh Misaki is incorrect. That's not the position DramaWiki wants to take. Groink 20:37, 24 Jul 2006 (EDT)

Ok--A10203040 20:45, 24 Jul 2006 (EDT)

Yes, I understand that. This page should explicitly state that that actor's personal preference in English name spelling goes before any other conventions. And, many Taiwanese actors do not use Pinyin, so you may want to suggest other systems for these specified people, as you would for Cantonese actors. And searching "Zhang Ziyi" turns up 1,880,000 hits on Google, while "Zhang Zi Yi" only turns up 79,400 hits. Furthermore, as a rule of thumb, all Mainland Chinese actors will use the traditional Pinyin system (e.g. Zhang Ziyi, Huang Xiaoming). It's more ambigious and up for grabs for Singaporeans, who may use Hokkien, Cantonese, or Pinyin in romanizing. It's not about being academically correct--it would be better to call it "Modified Pinyin" or "DramaWiki Pinyin. --Ahbeng 23:01, 24 Jul 2006 (EDT)