Automatic English-Chinese Name Transliteration for Development of Multilingual Resources

Stephen Wan, Cornelia Verspoor

Abstract: In this paper, we describe issues in the translation of proper names from English to Chinese which we have faced in constructing a system for multilingual text generation supporting both languages. We introduce an algorithm for mapping from English names to Chinese characters based on (1) heuristics about relationships between English spelling and pronunciation, and (2) consistent relationships between English phonemes and Chinese characters.