Displaying Both Chinese and English (Pinyin) names at the same time

Tak Keung Wong

Hi, I am a Chinese user and would like to suggest that the page of the family tree of ancestors can display both Chinese and English/Pinyin names at the same time because some users, including my children, can only understand English/Pinyin names. Also, it will be much easier for Chinese users to identify their related ancestors while searching in the database of FamilySearch because they can see both Chinese and English/Pinyin names. Besides, the Chinese names have embedded meanings which English names are not able to transmit. For your information, Pinyin has been an official romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese in Mainland China.

Jeromy

davidleelambert

Before I formally support this suggestion, I'd like to understand it better. How is it different from the existing ability to add an "Alternate Name" under "Other Information" in a record?

Would there be an optional romanization for every name fact? Or would it be sufficient to designate one "Alternate Name" as the "preferred romanization"?

And would this just be a field for you, as a user who is familiar **** both the Chinese characters and the corresponsiding Pinyin, to put the information in? Or are you asking for FamilySearch Tree to automatically do the conversion? (I don't think that's possible, as one Pinyin syllable can represent many characters, and in some cases I understand one character can be read as different Pinyin syllables depending on context [1]; but perhaps that isn't a problem for names.)

I imagine someone could use "Alternate Name" or "Custom Fact" to list a name in Wade-Giles or Postal romanization, as well.

Would your suggested feature also be useful for other people whose ancestors wrote their names in non-Latin scripts, or in a script other than the one the descendants typically use? Such as a Latin transcription of Cyrillic, or a Hangul transcription of Hanji, or a Katakana transcription of Kanji?

[1] https://www.digmandarin.com/duo-yin-zi-polyphones-chinese-characters.html

Julia Szent-Györgyi

@davidleelambert, when you enter a name in a non-Latin-script language, you get two (or more) sets of name boxes, with one of them being for a Romanized version of the name. However, inputs in those boxes are only shown on the profile's Details page, under Vitals or Other.

As I understand it, the suggestion is to add that Romanization next to or below the non-Latin characters in every place the name is shown, such as the page header, in search results, and in tree views. If the name was entered without a Romanization, then the display would of course be the same as it is now, but if a researcher took the time to enter this data, then people who can't read the non-Latin characters would be able to actually access that part of the Tree.