Chinese is traditionally written in complex characters. As such, it is not possible to transliterate the orthography in other languages, and instead transcription of the sound is the common practice. The only transliteration done is the contemporary conversion in the PRC of complex Chinese characters to a simplified form of characters, which could be said to have a relationship of “transliteration” to the traditional complex characters still used in Taiwan. Pinyin is the international standard for the phonetic transcription of Chinese using roman script. This replaced the earlier widespread Wade-Giles system of transcription – thus “Peking” became “Beijing,” and so forth. The basic details are documented on Wikipedia’s Pinyin site. The US Library of Congress also has a good site, including comparison to Wade-Giles, for its New Chinese Romanization Guidelines. Finally there is an interesting site called Pinyin.info which has a variety of references and other information about the use of Pinyin.

Unfortunately, the formatting of pinyin – and specifically the question of where to break words – is not standardized. The ALA-LC (American Library Association - Library of Congress) standards are commonly used in US libraries, and the relevant conventions for library cataloging are described at http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/romanization/chinese3.pdf These standards run roughly eighteen pages in length, about half of which are devoted to rules and examples of where to put spaces and where not in the combination/separation of syllables and words. Unfortunately, ALA and LC have changed the standards several times. Thus if you look in the library catalogs, you will see that sometimes the same Chinese word is handled differently, since the rules were different at the time of cataloging. The famous sacred mountain Wutaishan, for example, may appear as Wutai shan, Wutai Shan, or Wutaishan. The rough rule is that proper nouns are written without breaks, and everything else with breaks. The difficulty comes in deciding what counts as part of the proper noun, when is it acting as an adjective, etc. Is shan part of the name or is Wutai the name and Shan (“mountain”) the object described by Wutai? Is it Xizang zizhiqu or zi zhi qu? Some catalogers as a consequence have been trying to follow what they understand to be the standards, and then often adding in another line (a 246 field which is for alternate title) where they give the other version. In this way, they hope that people can find materials even if they are not part of the tiny percentage of the population that knows ALA-LC rules. Thus if the concern is to make materials findable on the web, following the ALA-LC cataloging standards is not the wisest course of action, at least not exclusively. We thus try to put the characters and then as many forms of romanization as we have time for; for pinyin, we try to adhere more to a “commonsense” approach more than the cataloging standard. People with experience helping users (from various linguistic backgrounds) with library catalogs have found that they usually search for zizhiqu, minzu, and gewutuan rather than zi zhi qu, min zu, and ge wu tuan respetively. If you put min zu on your page or in your metadata, and someone searches for minzu, s/he probably won’t find it; but if you have minzu, a search with min will find it.

There are a number of online sites that convert from simplified characters to traditional characters and vice versa. There are also sites that convert from Chinese characters to pinyin. One of these is http://www.purpleculture.net/chinese-pinyin-converter/ Some sites convert to pinyin with tone marks; some convert to pinyin with tone numbers; some convert to both. Thus far we have not found any sites that convert to pinyin without either tone marks or numbers.