Chinese to English Transliteration

"Chinese to English" usually means Pinyin

This is the most common thing people are looking for, and the phrasing is a little misleading. Converting 中国银行 gives you:

zhōng guó yín háng is not English. It is the Mandarin pronunciation written in letters an English reader can attempt. The translation would be Bank of China; the transliteration is zhōng guó yín háng. If you need the meaning rather than the sound, what you want is a translator, not this tool.

Why character-by-character conversion is not enough

Many Chinese characters have more than one reading, and which one is correct depends on the word the character appears in, not on the character itself. 行 is a clear case: in 银行 (bank) it is háng, and almost everywhere else it is xíng.

Getting these right needs a dictionary of words, not a table of characters. This is why the tool uses overtrue/pinyin, which matches whole words first, rather than the generic Unicode transliteration we use for other scripts. We tested the generic route and it returns "yín xíng" for 银行, which is wrong.

Chinese names are a separate case

Some characters have one reading in ordinary text and a different one when they are a surname, and the surname reading is the rarer of the two. Converting a name with the normal rules gives a plausible-looking result that a Chinese reader would recognise as wrong.

Tick "This is a personal name" under the input box above and the tool switches to surname readings. Leave it off for anything that is not a name, because then it applies surname readings where they do not belong.

Pinyin, Wade-Giles and Bopomofo

Pinyin is the official romanization in mainland China and the international standard, but it is not the only system you will come across. Older English spellings of Chinese words usually come from Wade-Giles, which is why some familiar words look nothing like their Pinyin:

Bopomofo (Zhuyin Fuhao) is the third system you may see, taught in Taiwan and written with its own symbols: ㄅ ㄆ ㄇ ㄈ. It records the same sounds, but since it does not use Latin letters it is not a romanization, so it falls outside what this tool does.

What the tone marks are for

Mandarin has four tones plus a neutral one, and the tone is part of the word rather than decoration on it. The same syllable with different tones is different words:

This is why the tool keeps the diacritics instead of stripping them. Pinyin without tones is still readable, but it is ambiguous in a way the original Chinese is not.

What this tool does not do

• It does not translate. You get pronunciation, not meaning.
• It does not go the other way. Turning Pinyin back into characters is a different problem: one Pinyin syllable matches dozens of characters, so choosing between them needs a predictive input method rather than a conversion rule.
• It is not infallible on readings. Word-level matching resolves the common cases, but no automatic system gets every character right in every context.
• It covers Mandarin. Cantonese and other varieties read the same characters differently and use their own romanizations, such as Jyutping.