Late to the party, but in my defense I was in China (Chengdu) for 5 days last week and now in Japan. Adding on to some excellent comments by @DPRK and @Reply
To clarify, I’m an American white guy that learned Mandarin at university, and spent 20 years in the SW China country side, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Taiwan starting in 1982 and moved back to the US in 2010. The mainland pinyin is what I learned and still use today. I learned wade-giles (developed by linguists) and the Yale system. Taiwan in the 1980’s had a wierd bastardized version of wade-giles, which is why it is “Taipei” and not “Taibei”. Now Taiwan uses an “improved version” of the mainland pinyin. Le sigh.
One very basic thing to understand about Mandarin (and probably all the dialects) is that it is a tonal language. As such as single syllable can be easily misconstrued orally. Therefore, most, at least spoken Chinese, is often di-syllabicized. In other words, compounds two syllables to ensure there is no mis-understanding. For example, “let’s go" instead of saying “go” aka 去 as one syllable, common usage would be “go out” aka 出去。Or “let’s go” is commonly spoken as 我们出去。
Also, that common longer terms are abbreviated. No different from “FBI” is an abbreviation of the Federal Bureau of Investigations (or “fart, barf and itch” depending). As @Reply pointed out above: proper full name is 中国人民解放军, i.e., the People’s Liberation Army of China. Another example would be the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution aka 文化大革命 is commonly referred to as “wenda” aka 文大。 One wouldn’t translate the abbreviation “wenda” literally, but I guess you could literally translate it as “language big” but that is non-sensical.
Language translation in general, and Mandarin specifically is a lot more than literally translating each and every character.
Not sure what the exact question is?
There is no accommodation to highlight a proper noun. As a mandarin major at University in the early 1980’s, it would drive me nuts to come across something like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Painstakingly look up each individual chinese character, and then try to make sense of it, and perhaps realizing it was a proper noun for a foreign name.
@hogarth In written chinese characters, there are no spaces between the words. There can be punctuation marks (commas, periods, sesame seed - not sure the proper term). No one actually reads pinyin that I’m aware of. Pinyin and tone marks were originally used to help students learning mandarin. Typically, the character would be on top, and the pinyin with tones underneath. So, at least back when I was a student, you would never come across “huangshan” vs “huang shan.” The news wire services adopted pinyin for proper nouns sometime around the end of the 1970’s/early 19080’s. Now, pinyin is widely used on computers or mobile phones to type out characters. Di-syllabized selections are probably 80% accurate as there are not that many di-syllabized choices. I’ve noticed that typing in longer pinyin strings such as a phrase or a sentence is getting pretty accurate at generating the correct corresponding characters. For example, WeChat (which every uses in China) is pretty good and improving over time.
hope this clarifies???
Whether that man is Confucius or Pai Mei, I cannot say…
