Neat Google Stuff

It seems that this search page will do transliteration from Pinyin to Chinese characters automatically, and give possible transliterations as options above the search results.

For example, go to the page and type ‘bei jing’ into the search bar and hit enter. Right above the results, you’ll see two pairs of characters that have have been linkified. Clicking them will do a new search with the characters instead of the Pinyin. The pair on the left is 北京, which seems to give hits on Google News results.

(Note that for all I know, it’s possible that ‘bei jing’ is a horrible insult and racial slur instead of being a transliteration of the name of the current capital of the PRC. If it is, I’m sorry. I don’t speak or read Chinese in any of its dialects.)