A Research on the Usage of Chinese Character in the Element Transliteration Name in Jinshi Shibie
During the late Qing Dynasty, the translator of Jinshi Shibie transliterates names with foreign elements into multisyllabic Chinese words. Through this investigation, I found that the translator’s choice of Chinese characters to be used in the transliteration element was mainly based on Xiaoyun of Guangyun. The characters selected with the principles include those easy to write, easy to distinguish, commonly used, and used for systemization. The main reason for different usage of Chinese characters in element transliteration name was mainly the switch of homophones or variant characters.