MangaDex Style:Romanization for Chinese Titles

This is a work in progress. Please don't edit this page.

This is the style guide that MangaDex uses to Romanize Mandarin Chinese titles on the site. These have been adopted from MangaBaka's Romanization style guide who originally wrote the original text. The goal is to have titles consistently Romanized across MangaDex, by defining a standard that is easy to read and write, while staying true to the linguistic norms.

Base Romanization

Hanyu Pinyin with adjustments

We follow standard Hanyu Pinyin with the following specific enhancements and deviations to align with our styling standards:

• Tonal diacritics: We strictly use tone marks (diacritics) for all syllables to ensure accurate identification (e.g., Mā vs Má vs Mǎ vs Mà).
• Loanword restoration: Translate clear phonetic English/foreign loanwords into their standard spelling (e.g., 巴士 → Bus, 粉丝 → Fans) instead of strict transliteration (so not Bāshì and Fěnsī).
• 之 as a separator: The character 之 (Zhī) is treated as a delimiter (colon) when separating a main title from a subtitle.
• Agglutination: We fuse compound words (polysyllabic words) according to standard orthography (e.g., 大学 → Dàxué, not Dà Xué), but keep grammatical particles separate.

Capitalization

As we are Romanizing titles of Chinese literature, we use the following capitalization style:

1. Capitalize all nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns and auxiliary verbs (when separated).
2. Keep lowercase all particles, prepositions, copulas and suffixes (when hyphenated).

Word spacing, fusions and hyphenation

Chinese characters (Hanzi) represent syllables, but Pinyin represents words (Ci). We standardize boundaries as follows:

• Compounds: Fuse standard dictionary compounds. If a word is a single concept composed of multiple characters, it is one word (e.g., 朋友 → Péngyǒu, not Péng Yǒu).
• Names: Surname first (capitalized) + given name (capitalized and fused). Unlike Korean, Chinese given names are fused without a hyphen (e.g., 毛泽东 → Máo Zédōng).
• Erhua (R-coloring): The suffix 儿 (-r) is fused to the preceding syllable (e.g., 花儿 → Huār, not Huā Er).
• Separation: Separate words that do not form a tight compound. Subject-verb-object structures are always separated.
• Apostrophes: Use an apostrophe strictly to disambiguate syllable boundaries when a syllable starting with a, o, or e follows another syllable (e.g., 西安 → Xī'ān vs 仙 → Xiān).

Tone in Romanization

We Romanize using the original dictionary tone, not the sandhi (changed) tone.

• 你好 → Nǐ hǎo, not Ní hǎo (even though it is pronounced with a rising tone on the first syllable).
• Yī (一) and Bù (不) retain their dictionary tones (yī, bù), regardless of the tone of the following word, to ensure search consistency.

Expanded explanation