RE: Chinese bibliographies

From: Tom Emerson (Tree@basistech.com)
Date: Mon Aug 23 1999 - 13:14:26 EDT


I've seen at least five ways of doing this. Common to all is the use of the
document style's bibliographic format, even for the Chinese entries.

1) The entire entry is in Chinese characters, sorted by the primary authors
(romanized) surname.

2) The author's name are transcribed in their preferred romanization (pinyin
for PRC, Wade-Giles for Taiwan), the title is in Chinese characters followed
by a romanized transliteration in pinyin), ditto for the name of the Journal
if it isn't already in English (as many are).

3) The author's name are transcribed in their preferred romanization, and
the article and publication title are provided in pinyin, with or without
parenthesized translation.

4) (2) with the title in English translation after the Han/pinyin.

5) The author's name is transcribed in their preferred romanization, and the
article and publication title are provided in English, with the entire entry
suffixed with "(In Chinese)".

It may be worth checking to see if there is a preferred style for foreign
bibliography entries in the publication you're submitting to.

Otherwise it seems that people pick whichever method is best given their
documentation tools. Personally I pick the one that makes the most sense for
the audience of the paper. Rarely do I use (5). I prefer either (2) or (3).
If the readership may be a mix of Mandarin and Cantonese speakers, then it
is good to provide the Han characters in the title.

HTH(tm),

        -tree

--
Tom Emerson                                          Basis Technology Corp.
Language Hacker                                    http://www.basistech.com
  "Beware the lollipop of mediocrity: lick it once and you suck forever."

-----Original Message----- From: peter_constable@sil.org [mailto:peter_constable@sil.org] Sent: Monday, August 23, 1999 10:21 AM To: Unicode List Subject: Chinese bibliographies

I need to give a bibliographic reference in an English document to a work in Chinese. Can anyone tell me what the norms are, if any, for forming a Chinese entry (with translation)?

Peter



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:51 EDT