In translation

How to write Chinese names with the help of the roman alphabet? Whoever writes about China in a Western language faces this problem. Fortunately linguists have long looked at it and developed several types of romanisation for Chinese characters.

Pinyin (拼音) is the official romanisation method in the People’s Republic of China and therefore by far the most widespread. It is the method we use at technological China.

When we mention Chinese names in our articles, we write them in Pinyin with the Chinese characters in brackets, e.g. Shanghai (上海). If the same word appears more than once in the same article, we will only add the Chinese characters to the first instance. Exceptions are Chinese brands whose English name is different from the Pinyin of their Chinese name, e.g. Lenovo (联想, pinyin: Lianxiang).

We leave out the accents, which are important; but would be to confusing for our purpose.

The Chinese pronunciation of a word is not always straightforward from its Pinyin. Learning how to write and pronounce Pinyin is usually the first step in learning Chinese.

More about Pinyin: pinyin.info; wikipedia.