romanisation – מילון אנגלי-אנגלי
Romanization
Romanization or
Latinization (or
romanisation,
latinisation: see spelling differences), in
linguistics, is the
conversion of writing from a different
writing system to the
Roman (Latin) script, or a system for doing so. Methods of romanization include
transliteration, for representing written text, and
transcription, for representing the spoken word, and combinations of both. Transcription methods can be subdivided into
phonemic transcription, which records the
phonemes or units of
semantic meaning in speech, and more strict
phonetic transcription, which records speech sounds with precision.
romanisation
nf.
romanization, act of taking on the characteristics of Roman culture or style
Pinyin
"Pinyin" literally means "phonetic spelling". The system was developed in the Sovied Union in 1931, and a slightly revised version was in 1958 introduced as the official system to transcribe Mandarin Chinese in the Peoples Republic of China.
The system makes use of the Latin/Roman characters "A" to "Z" (minus "V") plus four types of accents that denote the tones of each syllable. Some European letters are used for sounds not entirely corresponding to the letters (e.g. "Q" and "X" are used for sounds that might be described as "tch" and "sch").
Most countries of the modern world tend to use this system when romanising Chinese today - only emitting the tones. In China, the system is used for road signs, maps, brand names, computer input, Chinese Braille, telegrams, semaphore, in dictionaries, when teaching Chinese and many other purposes.
Enter the romanisation for for a syllable in Mandarin Chinese according to Pinyin or Wade-Giles, and this glossary will give you the corresponding transliteration according to other systems!
Further reading:
Bopomofo,
Chinese phonetics,
hanzi,
tones,
Wade-Giles,
Zhuyin 
Wade-Giles romanisation of Chinese
In the middle of the 19:th century Sir Thomas Wade introduced a system of transcribing Chinese characters with Latin/Roman characters. Professor Herbert Allen Giles published a modification of the same system in 1912. The system uses Latin/Roman letters for sounds rather similar to the actual letters - which is not always the case with Pinyin. Aspirations are marked with apostrophes. If marked, the tones are indicated with superscript numbers.
This system was, for many years, the most widely used to romanise Mandarin Chinese. People in the west are also still very familiar with transliterations written with this system (e.g. by rather saying "Peking" and "Mao Tze-Tung", that in Pinyin would be written as "Beijing" and "Mao Zedong"), even if Pinyin often is the recommended system to be used. The sytem is used in Taiwan for transliterating place names, street names and people's names. It also occasionally appear in Western publications (especially older works).
Enter the romanisation for for a syllable in Mandarin Chinese according to Pinyin or Wade-Giles, and this glossary will give you the corresponding transliteration according to other systems!
Further reading:
aspiration,
Bopomofo,
Chinese phonetics,
hanzi,
Pinyin,
tones,
Zhuyin
