Hey there. Anyone know of any links to sites that list English proper names (places, actors, politicians, etc) and their Chinese equivelents? Would sure appreciate any knowledge … need to find a substantial amount of data…
I heard Xinhua had some sort of index online, but I cannot find it.
Anyway, thanks and all.
Using the roman alphabet does not change one language into another. Most of what you want are not really “English” names. They’re Mandarin names written in romanization.
OK, end of lecture. Here’s part of what you’re after.
For Taiwan places, see my site:
romanization.com/cities/
For Taiwan politicians, see the members of the Legislature and misc. other big names.
Thanks for the lecture. I know that Romanization doesn’t provide a translation – rather I’m looking for equivelents. My goal here is to determine what constraints are used when changing English consonant clusters to more simplistic Mandarin monosyllables. So, for example, a /br/ cluster in English often (always?) alternates to /bl/ when adopted as a loanword. So, /Brooklyn/ --> /Bu.lu.ke.lin/
Your examples are well-and-good but what I need is data that is in English originally and after switched to Mandarin. To keep things simple, I’d prefer to use place names and proper names – but there are plenty of examples of loanwords (Without semantic imput), so /Golf/ --> /gao.fu/ and /salad/ -->/sha.la/
Anyway, if you or anyone knows of a list of such data PLEASE let me know!
Thanks so much
I’m so used to people getting that wrong that I didn’t recognize when you got it right. Sorry, my mistake. 
Xinhua sites of interest should be here 202.84.17.11/en/htm/eglo.htm
But they don’t seem to be working now.
You might also want to look at this paper and the works it cites: LANGUAGE CONTACT AND LEXICAL INNOVATION, by Benjamin K.T. T’sou.
The topic is addressed briefly in the relevent section of the guidelines for Hanyu Pinyin. As the chapter notes, such conversions have been extremely inconsistent (and not just where the two sides of the Taiwan Strait are concerned but also internally), so it may be hard to determine much from them.
I bought three place-name dictionaries for the Youth Hostels office in Taibei. I think they are still there. The office is located on the 12th floor of the Asiaworld building, right next to the Mitsukoshi building. Just go up there and ask for Rocky. The mainland placename dictionary has appendices with instructions on how to represent English, French, German, Spanish and Russian place names with Chinese characters.