Romanization of Chinese in The Republic of China - Personal Names

Personal Names

Most people in Taiwan have their names romanised using a variation of Wade-Giles. This simplified version employs no diacritics (tone marks, apostrophes and umlauts) and, in semi- and unofficial contexts, usually incorrectly capitalized. The first letter in the second character of the given names should be, according to governmental and academic conventions, in the lower case, but in reality usually not. For example, Lü Hsiu-lien is sometimes written incorrectly as Lu Hsiu-Lien, contrary to the set rules of Wade-Giles. The use of Wade-Giles is generally not out of personal preference but because this system has been used by most government offices' reference materials in Taiwan to date.

There are a few Taiwanese personalities (such as politicians) whose names are transcribed in obscure or idiosyncratic schemes. For instance, using any major romanisation, Lee Teng-hui's surname would have been Li. Vincent Siew's surname and Ma Ying-jeou's given name are also peculiarly romanised. The single closest romanization to Chen Shui-bian's name would be Hanyu Pinyin, except that Hanyu Pinyin never uses hyphens in given names.