Displaying Both Chinese and English (Pinyin) names at the same time
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
Comments
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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
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@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.
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Yes! I am working on my Chinese family line and this is a big concern I have. We have tried to switch and put the Roman letters first and Chinese characters under and the display is still not correct. This has been a concern on a number of levels, especially for those who want to do church/temple work and share names with the temple. When only the Chinese characters are shown on the initial page (one has to get into the details of the person in order to see the roman characters of their name) then these individuals records when wanting to share with the temple seem to be limited to the Taiwan and Hong Kong temples instead of being sent throughout. We would really love this fixed so both spellings can be seen initially.
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