Transliteration Into Chinese Characters - History

History

Transcription appeared early in ancient Chinese texts when the Han people interacted with foreigners such as the Xiongnu. Besides proper names, a small number of loanwords in their transcribed forms found their way into Chinese during the Han Dynasty after Zhang Qian's exploration of the Western Regions.

Transcriptions of other languages are found in ancient texts. A complete transcribed text of a short Yue song, known as Yueren Ge (越人歌 "Song of the Yue man"), is found in Liu Xiang's Shuoyuan (說苑/说苑 "Garden of stories") of the Western Han Dynasty, along with a Chinese version of the song. Some scholars have tried to reconstruct the original text.

The classics of Buddhism began to be translated into Chinese during the late Han Dynasty. Many Sanskrit terms were then transcribed and became part of the Chinese language. According to the Song Dynasty scholar Zhou Dunyi (周敦義/周敦义), the famous monk and translator Xuanzang had his Wuzhong Bu Fan (五種不翻/五种不翻 "Five kinds not translate"), suggesting that Sanskrit terms should be transcribed instead of being translated when they are:

• Arcane, such as incantations
• Polysemous
• Not found in China
• Traditionally transcribed, not translated
• Lofty and subtle, which a translation might devalue and obscure

These ancient transcription into Chinese characters provide clues to the reconstruction of Middle Chinese. In historical Chinese phonology, this information is called duiyin (對音/对音 "corresponding sounds"), with Baron Alexander von Staël-Holstein being the first scholar to emphasize its importance in reconstructing ancient Chinese. The transcriptions made during the Tang Dynasty are particularly valuable as linguistic data, as the Tantra sect was then popular, with the mantras, an important Tantra practice, rendered very carefully into Chinese characters by the monk-translators. The spells, it was believed, would lose their power when their sounds were not accurately uttered.

During the late 19th century, when Western ideas and products flooded China, transcriptions mushroomed. They include not only transcriptions of proper nouns, but also those of common nouns, i.e. phonemic loans. Most of them proved fads, though. After that period, people tend to favor loan translations.

In modern Japanese, foreign terms are transcribed into katakana. Some terms still appear in kanji, though, an example being 俱樂部/倶楽部, (クラブ "gathering fun department"=club). Some were absorbed into Chinese during the late 19th and early 20th century. For more about the use of Chinese characters to represent Japanese native words and foreign words, see ateji.