Hanzi Transliteration Syllabary

Below is a table of Chinese characters that are commonly used in transliterating foreign names and words. It might be helpful for beginning learners of Chinese who want to learn to pronounce transliterated names and borrowed words.

Transliterating into Chinese characters is different from transliterating into other writing systems in a few ways. One important way is that, for any given sound in Mandarin Chinese, there are usually many possible characters to choose from. For transliterating given names and place names, however, there is a fairly standard set of characters that are used.

These characters are generally chosen because they denote positive qualities or they have few strokes. Of course, there is variation, and transliterations of place names often use different characters than those of person names and other nouns, because meaning of characters is also taken into account, but there is a lot of overlap.

The table below was compiled by analysing the frequency of characters found in transliterations, and generating an HTML table from the resulting data file using make_syllabary.py. The data files that were analysed, which are interesting in their own right are:

• syllabary/borrowed_words.txt
• syllabary/city_translit.txt
• syllabary/country_translit.txt
• syllabary/name_translit.txt