CJK Cataloguing

CJK Cataloguing Workflows
Romanising Korean Personal Names
Wade-Giles to Pinyin Conversion Program

CJK Cataloguing Workflows

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Romanising Korean Personal Names With Two or More Surnames

1. If a Romanised Korean personal name includes a combination of two or more surnames, separate the syllables with a space and capitalise each syllable. Such a name could consist of a combination of a husband and wife's family names, a mother and daughter's family names, etc.

2. If the name includes two or more surnames, but one of these is indicated as chief, use that name as the surname, and provide a SEE REFERENCE from the two surnames together.

3. Henceforth, the Library of Congress will change existing headings on authority and bibliographic records so that they are consistent with this format
i.e. Surname 1, Surname 2, Forename, etc.
For example, if we find an authority record with the heading O-Chang, Mi-gyong, we would change it to O Chang, Mi-gyong.

4. These names are to be distinguished from single surnames that consist of two or more syllables (Namgong, Sonu).

Regional and Cooperative Cataloging Division
Library of Congress
18 January 2002

About the Wade-Giles / Pinyin Conversion Program

The Wade-Giles to Pinyin Conversion Program (W2P) was developed by the Australian National Chinese Japanese Korean (CJK) Service Team in 1996 with advice from Karl Lo of the University of California, San Diego.

W2P will convert records that have Chinese words in Wade-Giles Romanisation into Pinyin Romanisation. It is designed to convert Chinese bibliographic records, as well as records in other languages such as Japanese, Korean or English which use Wade-Giles, from Wade-Giles to Pinyin. When converting Chinese words from Wade-Giles into Pinyin, W2P removes any hyphens in proper and geographic names and joins the syllables together, so that the following National CJK System Pinyin word-division standard can be maintained:

That, where a cataloguer inputs Pinyin data into the National CJK System, each Chinese character should be input as one Pinyin syllable, except for proper and geographic names, where the syllables should be joined.

W2P will not convert words blindly. Often records requiring conversion contain words in other languages which can resemble Chinese words in Wade-Giles Romanisation. To avoid conversion of these words, a mechanism was developed in W2P to identify them.

Since certain MARC tag and subfield combinations will never contain any Romanised words, the program only checks those tag and subfield combinations that contain Chinese words in Wade-Giles Romanisation. If Chinese words in Wade-Giles are found in these tag and subfield combinations, they are converted into Pinyin according to the word conversion tables in W2P. If any non-Chinese words which resemble Chinese words are found in these tag and subfield combinations, they are converted but flagged for human review. Human review safeguards the accuracy of conversions. A special logic has been designed and incorporated into the program to keep the number of subfields flagged for human review to a manageable level.

Naturally more Chinese words are found in Chinese records than in Japanese, Korean or English records, and it would be uneconomical to uniformly convert a datafile that has a mixture of Chinese, Japanese and Korean records e.g. LCCJK, OCLCCJK, RLINCJK. W2P will split datafiles of this type into 4 subfiles : Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Others. Each has a different word conversion table and different tag and subfield combination check list. After conversion, the subfiles are re-assembled into one file.

W2P is written in C and is a menu driven program. It is easy to operate and has the capacity to convert a large number of records in minimum time. It also contains a number of useful utilities to facilitate the conversion, e.g. ftp, records counting, spanned/unspanned format conversion etc.

The Australian National CJK System successfully used W2P to convert its entire CJK data of a million records from Wade-Giles to Pinyin to establish its Pinyin database. W2P has already attracted interest from many other libraries who are currently contemplating Wade-Giles to Pinyin conversion of their own data.

See the User Documentation (available in MS Word and Adobe PDF) for more detailed information about the conversion program.

 User Guide
Available as a Word document or as PDF

 Obtain the Wade-Giles to Pinyin Conversion Software (W2P)
How to obtain the software