A Word About Chinese/English Translations

Why, you may ask, is Qigong spelled so many different ways? While collaborating on a book written in the year 2000, we discovered eight different spellings (e.g., Chi Kung; Chi Kong; Chee Kong; Chi Gung, Chi Gong; Chee Gawng, Qi Gung, Qi Gong). This is a result of phonetic spellings of sounds unfamiliar to—perhaps even incompatible with—the Roman alphabet. The Mainland China and Taiwan interpretations of Romanized spelling for Chinese words differ, sometimes greatly. In addition, the historical points of reference regarding each instructor's educational process (e.g., their teachers; the era their teachers drew knowledge from; where each author studied, etc.) adds another level of confusion. To alleviate that confusion for our readers, we offer the following information.

Transliteration is much more of an art than it is a science, and you'll find terms spelled many different ways when they get transliterated into English.

There are two primary systems in use today. The older is Wade-Giles, and it has changed much over the course of its history. Thus older transliterations employing the Wade-Giles system will differ from recent examples.

Pinyin is the other primary system widely used today. It is based on transliteration from Chinese into Russian, so when you see the letter "X", that is actually a reference to a character in the Cyrillic alphabet.

The existence of these two systems explains why we have such widely divergent spellings as Qi and Chi, or Beijing and Peking.

There is a third system called Yale. It's use is not widespread, but it is commonly used in Taiwan for teaching Mandarin to foreigners.

The bottom line is that there are many different ways to transliterate from Chinese into English. [See samples below] The details of any given transliteration will depend on:

• which system used
• whether it is recent or dated material, and even
• the judgment of the individual doing the work.

For a comparison of the different systems, see

http://exodus.lcsc.edu/cbiouser/wgpyingu.htm

http://www.m.isar.de/denner/neijia/romanisation/mapping.html