pinyinization

The Romanization of Standard Mandarin using the Pinyin system.

In Chinese, the speakability-readability problem is capable of various solutions depending on the audience for which the Pinyinized material is intended. A dilemma exists in the fact that the work of Pinyinization must be undertaken by people who are already literate—which means literate in characters—and Chinese literati, even of the newer generation, have displayed even less capacity than their Western counterparts to write in a style capable of ready comprehension by ordinary people.

There are a couple of reasons for that. One is that official pinyinization only applies to PRC placenames. This lets out Taipei and, until recently, Hong Kong and Kowloon.

An instance of Pinyin text.

There are several erroneous pinyinizations (Guang wu/Guangwu, Chang sha/Changsha, Guang zhou/Guangzhou, Shui-hu-ti/Shuihudi, Hupei/Hubei, jhiu/jiu, You Yingshi/Yu Yingshi, kao/xiao [...]

Note that many Chinese characters have more than one possible Pinyin representation. For instance, there are actually 16 different Chinese pinyinizations of the Chinese transliteration of Ashburton, according to the tables our system uses to map a Chinese character to its Pinyin.

Alternative letter-case form of Pinyinization.