Citation of Chinese sources in English

Citation of Chinese sources in English . . . A very important purpose of citation: to allow the interested reader to track down your sources herself and verify that they say what you say they say. It's like spelling out your experimental method in a science paper so as to allow others to attempt to reproduce your results. When you don't allow the reader to find your source, a citation is merely an acknowledgment that you found the language in question somewhere else or an unverifiable claim that you found the fact in question somewhere else. It says to the reader, "Hey, trust me!" Comments In my experience pinyin transliteration is usually sufficient. I don't want to make unreasonable demands or require that everyone be a China expert. I just want writers and publishers to make a good-faith effort to let the reader find the work in question. That said, I think the argument for using characters instead of pinyin is getting stronger. First of all, characters provide more information than pinyin - if the pinyin represents an ordinary word, a competent Chinese speaker can figure out the characters, but that's not the case if the pinyin represents a personal name or uncommon place name. Second, the technological argument against characters is by now pretty much obsolete. It used to be a pain for writers and publishers to insert characters into English-language documents. Now it's easy (although regrettably my favorite word processing application, WordPerfect, still doesn't do Chinese characters in any simple way). People who don't speak Chinese will, of course, not be able to understand the Chinese character references at all, but then they wouldn't be able to understand the pinyin references, either. The only loss, I think, will be to non-Chinese speakers who want to cite indirectly a Chinese reference contained in someone else's article. (I.e., X cites to Chinese document Y in support of proposition Z, and I want to state the same proposition Z but can't read Chinese, so I say, "See Y, cited in X" or "See X (citing Y)." This is a genuine cost. One solution, of course, is to make sure that all citations in characters are accompanied either by pinyin or by an English translation. Posted by: Don Clarke May 29, 2008 12:47:22 AM I agree that characters are best and pinyin is a strong second, but I am not particularly thrilled with the guidance from the Bluebook regarding foreign citations. Do you have a favorite foreign citation guide? I've heard of several in the works. Posted by: Otto Malmgren Jun 19, 2008 2:00:38 AM Otto, I think it's hard to say in the abstract without knowing more about your audience, where it will appear, typesetting abilities of the printer, etc. The message I would really like to convey is that we should think about the needs of the reader in making these decisions, and not just follow the habits of the era before it was easy to insert Chinese characters into documents. I think that by and large pinyin and characters are equally useless to the non-Chinese-speaking reader, whereas characters are much more useful than pinyin to the Chinese-speaking reader. Therefore, I favor characters in general. But there might always be special cases where pinyin was preferable. Posted by: Don Clarke Jun 19, 2008 6:41:06 AM Thanks, Don! Yes, I do agree that the use of characters would be preferable regardless of audience (although I know there are a lot of pinyin readers out there that don't necessarily read characters, but that would be interested in the terms for their spoken Chinese). It is especially with regard to the reader that I am asking. I'm always a bit frustrated when translated terms are used alone without the Chinese term, or title as in your above example from the Special Rapporteur on Torture's report, and I would think it is only the polite thing to do for the reader to include specific terms or titles, as well as proper cites. But I am worried that English-language publishers are not able to print characters. I remember not too long ago that I had to assist in making a bitmap format (like a picture) character for a publication because the publisher would not be able to print a true-type or unicode font. Posted by: Otto Malmgren Jun 22, 2008 11:43:11 PM I absolutely agree with you, this is a huge problem. The absolutely worst is articles that only have translated versions, there is not even anything to tell you that the original is not in English (The Journal of Higher Education in China could be an English language journal - but it isn't, how are we to know though?). Pinyin is better, but still not ideal. And especially with the atrocious preference in APA for only using the autors initials. If I see a person cited as 李生桥, I might say "Oh, that's the person whose paper I was reading the other day", but if I see a reference to "Li, X.", it's quite useless. I struggled with this when I was writing my MA thesis about China, and I did quite a bit of research (weird that nobody have really addressed this problem). I finally found that Chicago allowed me to include both the characters, the pinyin and the English translation, which to me was ideal. I wrote about this solution here: http://reganmian.net/blog/2010/05/06/how-to-cite-chinese-sources-in-chicago-style/ I used this in my MA thesis, which is available for download from here: http://reganmian.net/top-level-courses. This practice also served me well when I had the thesis translated to Chinese (I will release it on that blog in a few days) - I could just take out the pinyin and English, and I had a Chinese source list. Thank you for raising this issue. We should try to push for these practices to change. In regular journals that do not specialize in China, we will probably have to settle for Pinyin, but never only English, and ideally the full name rather than just initials. But in journals and monographs dealing specifically with China, written by sinologists, I think we should expect characters as well! Stian / 侯爽 How to cite Chinese sources in Chicago style I am always interested in improving my academic “workflow”, new neat tools that can help me keep track of all my notes, PDFs, drafts, citations, etc. I use DevonThink to keep most of my PDFs, and a lot of web pages, as well as most of my research notes. I then transfer these over to Scrivener for the actual writing. Scrivener is an absolutely amazing product, that has really changed the way I write – and all the friends I’ve shown it to, have begun using it as well. I could never imagine going back to unwieldy Word. The one thing I’ve been holding back on, is a reference manager. I went through a spell during my BA Honors thesis, when I downloaded and tried a whole raft of programs, but I could never find one that suited my style and wasn’t slowing me down during my writing. So the whole thing was done by hand, which worked – although when I later split it into two articles, both needing just a subset of the citations, and in different formats, it was a real pain. Currently, I am just starting on the writing phase for my MA thesis (I’ve been doing the research for the last two years), and I thought it would be worth checking again. I had looked at Bookends before, but maybe it’s because it has improved since last time, or that I had a better idea of my needs – this time I felt I could really use it. So I bought a license, and began reading the manual and looking at how I could integrate it with my workflow. One of my big issues last time I investigated these programs, was that I felt that they put me in a strait-jacket with their definitions of publication types. I want to register this as a newspaper article – but I also want to specify the URL where I found it. In Bookends, you can add and modify all the built-in publication types, and even create your own, so you could add a URL field to the “newspaper” type. I have also been struggling with how to deal with citations in foreign languages, and specifically Chinese. My thesis is about higher education in China, and I will be citing many Chinese journal articles and reports. It has always annoyed me how most books about China only use transliterated (pinyin) Chinese in their citations, telling you that Li, X. (2010) wrote a paper about “Shuini de fazhan” in “Xiandai Shuini Zazhi”. Often you can fairly easily guess what characters the pinyin represent, but not always. And with a truncated author name like Li, X., it would be almost impossible to find other articles by the same author. So I was wondering if the big citation styles, APA and Chicago, etc, had said anything about including Chinese characters into the bibliography. At that time, I asked several people, and even sent an e-mail to the Asia library, but found no answer, or mention of it. Today, I stumbled over a passage in the Chicago Style handbook, which I will paste here (since it’s behind a paywall): 10.108: Inclusion of original characters Chinese and Japanese characters, immediately following the romanized version of the item they represent, are sometimes necessary to help readers identify references cited or terms used. They are largely confined to bibliographies and glossaries. Where needed in running text, they may be enclosed in parentheses. Computer technology has made it much easier than it used to be to typeset words in non-Latin alphabets. Hua Linfu 華林甫, “Qingdai yilai Sanxia diqu shuihan zaihai de chubu yanjiu” 清代以來三峽地區水旱災害的初步硏究 [A preliminary study of floods and droughts in the Three Gorges region since the Qing dynasty], Zhongguo shehui kexue 中國社會科學 1 (1999): 168–79 . . . Harry Harootunian and Sakai Naoki, “Nihon kenkyū to bunka kenkyū 日本研究と文化研究, Shisō 思想 7 (July 1997): 4–53. That year the first assembly of the national Diet was held and the Imperial Rescript on Education (kyōiku chokugo 敎育勅語) issued. So they do allow you to do this! Assuming that my graduate school accepts Chicago Style, I now have a legitimate way of doing this in my MA thesis. And since Bookends is so flexible, I was able to clone the Chicago B style, insert a few custom types, and register this information whenever I type in new citations. Changing the output format, I was able to generate a citation that looks exactly like the format above. However, if I should ever be submitting to a journal that doesn’t like this format, it’s done in a few seconds to switch the entire bibliography to another format. Brilliant. I also like how Bookends let’s you insert simple “temporary references”, either auto-generated or handwritten by you, such as {Boyle, 1980}. These are just plain text, and work well in Scrivener, travels well from one editing software to another etc, and when you are finally done, you can just run the file through Bookends to have it all expanded and formatted. Very clean and nice, compared to some of the solutions that integrate deep within OpenOffice or Word, which I have had poor experiences with. So now I just have to sit down and write this thesis… Stian