Chinese Romanization Converter

What the romanisation systems are, and why there are several

Mandarin has been written in the Latin alphabet many times over, and each attempt served a different purpose. Pinyin is the standard of the People's Republic of China and of the ISO, and it is what a learner meets first. Wade-Giles came out of nineteenth-century Britain and still marks the spellings the English-speaking world inherited: Peking, Mao Tse-tung, Tao. EFEO is the French equivalent, used by French sinologists until the 1970s. Yale was designed in the United States during the Second World War to be readable at sight by an English speaker with no training at all. Tongyong was Taiwan's official system for a few years in the 2000s.

Zhuyin, better known as bopomofo, belongs to a different family: it is not a romanisation but an alphabet of its own, made of symbols derived from Chinese characters. It is still taught in primary schools in Taiwan, and it is what most Taiwanese keyboards use. A syllable written in zhuyin cannot be mistaken for an English word, which is exactly why it was designed that way.

This is why a converter is useful rather than a curiosity. A name you found in an old book, a place name on a nineteenth-century map, a title in a library catalogue, a caption in a Taiwanese textbook: they are the same syllables spelled by different conventions, and reading them in the one you know is often all you need to recognise the word.