Study On The Usage Of Words For Transliteration Of Toponym In Modern Chinese

The process of transliterating alien words in modern Chinese is the conversion process between writing language forms that is of two different language units, which takes Chinese characters as media. Because Chinese characters has the properties of complexity and pluralism on signifier, signified and their mutual relation, it is necessary for translators to take the accuracy problems on the mutual conversion between two different language units and the non-uniformity among different elements into consideration, as well as the normative and operability in application level when the translation results are used in Chinese vocabulary system.Transliteration of toponym is an important part of loan words. Because it covers a wide range and has great influence, the transliteration of toponym must implement unification and standardization. However, the present situation is that the translation is disorganized in this field. Although a series of dictionaries about this subject were published by our government since 1978, the disordered state was never changed drastically because of various factors such as habits formed for a long time and property of language itself. Lots of articles gave out some suggestions to standardize loan words, but most of them didn't sort and analyze quantitatively and weren't carried out. Thus they became assumptions finally. From the linguistics view and combining some theories about toponymy and translatology, this dissertation analyzes transliterating toponym in detail in order to find the law of characters using and the reason why some of them deviate this law. The purpose of this dissertation is not only to make some contribution to the word choice standard of transliterating toponym and names, but also to give us a detailed understanding about the development of Chinese characters such as sound, form, meaning from another side so as to grasp the flexibility and diversity of the usage of them. Five chapters are included in this dissertation.The first chapter was exordium. A brief introduction was given in this part to illustrate present situation about the transliterating toponym research. Research object, research perspective and research method were also described in this exordium. Quantitative method was adopted in this dissertation. It included 345 representative alien toponyms. Descriptive explanations were given about the usage of their Chinese characters through comparative study.The second chapter presented analysis about the Chinese characters usage of transliterating toponym from the perspective of pronunciation. Belonging to two different phonetic systems, Chinese and English had great differences in pronunciation, which mad it necessary to chinesize English in different degree when they are translated into Chinese, such as conversing vowels in English into diphthongs in Chinese, conversing voiced consonants into voiceless consonant and so on. Then corresponding Chinese characters were chosen according to their Chinese pronunciation.In the third chapter, the laws, which were about the usage of characters in transliterating toponyms, were analyzed from the form and meaning perspectives. When characters were chosen for transliterating toponym, their pronunciation must be taken into consideration, and so did their forms and meanings. Chinese characters belongs to ideographic system. At the same time, they also have the feature of parata in grammar. These made us to choose simple characters in meaning when we chose characters in transliterating to avoid association or ambiguity, and to try our best to avoid emotional words. The characters should be easy to remember and artistic. There were many other cases that the final selections were influenced by the combined effect of form and meaning of the words.In the forth chapter, some other factors, which affected the final characters selections in transliterating toponym were analyzed. These included history, politics, culture, imbalance of language development, and so on.The fifth chapter made a simple comparison between exceptions that didn't obey the word choosing law and the standardization of transliterating toponym. These exceptions were not only because of factors such as following the history and obeying conventions, but also some abnormal phenomena, which must be corrected.The sixth chapter was a conclusion. A summary was made about the content of this dissertation.