Re: The translation of 漢字 (Was: English editing)

The Japanese word 'kanji' is nowadays used regularly in English for Han 
characters used in Japanese, although this usage is usually to contrast 
with hiragana/katakana. However, the Chinese word 'hanzi' is unlikely to 
be known by most people, and it's English equivalent is generally Han 
characters, or ideographic characters.

The Unicode Standard is a good place to look for definitions and common 
usage in English. It says:

"Terminology. Several standard romanizations of the term used to refer 
to East Asian ideographic characters are commonly used. They include
hànzì (Chinese), kanzi (Japanese), kanji (colloquial Japanese), hanja 
(Korean), and Chữhán (Vietnamese). The standard English translations for 
these terms are interchangeable: Han character, Han ideographic 
character, East Asian ideographic character, or CJK ideographic 
character. For clarity, the Unicode Standard uses some subset of the 
English terms when referring to these characters."

Note how the paragraph distinguishes between romanizations (ie. 
non-English words) and English translations.

The Unicode standard uses 'Han character' mostly and sometimes Han 
ideographic character.

hope that helps,
ri

On 01/04/2015 02:43, chen-zhuang wrote:
> I prefered to Hanzi at begining because the terminology Hanzi was
> already defined in a national standard (GB XXXX-19XX, I do not remember
> the detail number), but I may change my mind after reading message from
> Ishida san.
> FYI:
> The ISO/IEC 10646 Universal Coded Character Set uses:
> Hanzi for whole China
> Kanji for Japan
> Hanja for N. and S. Korea
> ChuNom for Vietnam
> Chen Zhuang
> China Electronics Standardization Institute
> 在2015年03月31 20时45分, "Richard Ishida"<ishida@w3.org>写道:
>
>     On 31/03/2015 13:38, Yijun Chen wrote:
>      >> Yes, i'm glad you brought this up, since i wondered about that
>     too. I
>      >> left the translation as Hanzi for now, but that's really not a
>      >> translation, it's more of a transliteration of the Chinese (and
>     should
>      >> probably have a lowercase H). I would prefer to change it.
>      >
>      > The reason I used Hanzi was because the term ‘Kanji’ shows up several
>      > times in JLReq. There are a lot of Japanese transliterations in the
>      > document as well, such as hanmen (版面), etc.
>
>     Yes, but kanji *is* the english translation for the japanese term
>     and is
>     used widely in english.  Hanzi is not widely used in english. It's a
>     translation oddity ;-)
>
>     And i think there was no real equivalent in english for hanmen.
>
>     This is not to say that the Japanese doc is perfect. Probably far from
>     it.  But i think we can account for those terms as I describe.
>
>      >> The standard uses Han character and Han ideographic character
>     most of
>      >> the time.
>      >>
>      >> I'm inclined to use 'Han character'.  There may be instances where
>      >> what is meant is full-width character, if punctuation are to be
>      >> included. I haven't checked for those instances yet.
>      >
>      > I would prefer Han character now. Usually, when we say 漢字 orally or
>      > literally, it does not include punctuation, only the characters
>     themselves.
>
>     Ok. So who else do we need to check this with before replacing 'hanzi'
>     with 'han character' throughout?
>
>     ri
>
>
>
>
>

Received on Wednesday, 1 April 2015 05:28:13 UTC