CedPane: Chinese-English Dictionary Public-domain Additions for Names Etc

汉英词典公有领域专名等副刊CedPane

From http://ssb22.user.srcf.net/cedpane/

(mirrored at http://ssb22.gitlab.io/cedpane/ just in case)

English summary

People learning Chinese as a foreign language sometimes use software to help them read a text. But when Western names are written using Chinese characters, the result is not always something an average dictionary can help with—the software might give you an inappropriate “analysis” like 沃(wò)=irrigate 兹(zī)=this/now 沃(wò)=irrigate 思(sī)=thought instead of 沃兹沃思(Wòzīwòsī)=Wordsworth. So I found it useful to compile a list of names (focusing on, but not limited to, Western names) and some other potentially-useful phrases not always found in learners’ software, with examples of how these have been written in Chinese, which we can add to our software to help with our reading.

While the primary purpose of this list is to help software recognise a name when it sees one, it’s understandable that some people will also want to use it to ‘look up’ how a specific name “should” be translated. However:

1. There is sometimes more than one way that a particular non-Chinese name has been written in Chinese.

   • Sometimes it “doesn’t really matter”—you can pick any of the existing translations, or even invent a new one (within reason), and nobody will mind.

   • But occasionally it _does matter_—the translation you choose might imply you are of a certain age, persuasion or background (which you might or might not want to identify with), and in extreme cases you could offend someone and suffer the consequences. So I have to disclaim all legal liability for your use of my data!

2. Sometimes several different Western names can be written the same way in Chinese, and are therefore indistinguishable in back-translations.

So please don’t take my list as an “authority”, and definitely don’t use it to criticise other translations (it’s not exhaustive). The lexicography here is descriptive (what I have seen done), not necessarily prescriptive (saying what “should” be done).

I’ve been wanting to put as much as possible into the public domain, so that commercial software like Wenlin, Pleco, Hanping and ChinaScribe as well as community projects like CC-CEDICT and online services can all help learners to read by incorporating these words by default instead of an “after-market” addition. But I was held back by possible ‘intellectual property’ considerations: if I (as a learner) saw a word in a text, and wanted my software to recognise it next time, I’d add it to my personal dictionary (with extra notes on where and when I saw it, and maybe other thoughts too), but that by itself doesn’t mean I can share it: how do I know my source doesn’t have some kind of “trademark rights” to their particular way of writing it?

I now understand that most countries’ copyright laws do include a provision for third-party indexing, so you can say “I saw this word on page 234 of that book” and not be held liable for copyright infringement of favourite books that feature too often in your list: at worst, your list is an index of your books, which is (in countries that have those provisions) allowed. But you still run the risk of accidentally defaming a book by writing wrong notes—there are “free speech” laws protecting reviews (up to a point), but I quite like the books I read and didn’t want to cast them in a bad light by publishing all my misunderstandings.

So I tried querying a large Chinese Internet search engine for each of my words, to get some measure of which words were common enough to warrant disregarding my reading notes and just saying "here's a translation that's 'out there' and worth recognising". I had to be careful to ensure the search results really showed the word in common use (not just illegal copies of the source I read), and I also had to beware of having documented a rare different use-case of an otherwise common word.

After subsetting and editing my database, I can now present 81% of the ‘specialist’ words I collected between 2009 and 2025 as confirmed “public domain” words you can do what you want with (i.e. please do add them to products to help learners—and email me if you’d like me to mention here that you’ve added it to your product). The other 19% (and my reading notes) have not been added to CedPane, but I hope it’s already useful.

This Git repository contains a tab-delimited text file with the following columns:

1. Word as it might be written in an English text (in the case of a non-English name this is usually a transcription), or a brief definition

2. Simple-form (“Simplified”) Chinese

3. Full-form (“Traditional”) Chinese

4. Mandarin pronunciation in Hanyu Pinyin

5. Cantonese pronunciation in Yale: provisional as my Cantonese is much worse than my Mandarin, so I haven’t been able to proof-read this column to the same standard

6. English pronunciation in IPA; for words where I wanted to correct my English speech synthesizer; other pronunciations may be equally correct

Of course it goes without saying that, despite my best efforts, mistakes are possible anywhere (as is true of every dictionary) and I’m happy to receive corrections.

I also have a separate collection of Chinese words that are in typical dictionaries, with short English definitions that have either been confirmed by multiple independent sources to the extent that it is reasonable to believe they are public domain, or that I’ve written myself. This separate collection is not likely to help with software that already has a good normal dictionary, but it might be useful for developers to prototype interlinear annotators etc. It is in the repository as PD-English-Definitions but has not been included in the main CedPane file.

Meanwhile, the file word-overrides lists words that are often over-matched which you might be better off deactivating from dictionaries.

中文摘要

(I used a Chinese LLM to improve my translation)

汉语学习者常借助软件辅助阅读，但这类软件的词典往往缺少对专有名词（如人名、地名）的收录。例如，“沃兹沃思” 是英国诗人Wordsworth的中文译名，但一些软件会错误地将其拆解为“沃（灌溉）兹（这个）沃（灌溉）思（思想）”，而无法识别这是一个整体音译的姓名。

为此，我整理了这份《专名等副刊》（CedPane），收录了大量常见于中文文本但未被通用词典充分覆盖的音译名和特殊表达，旨在帮助软件更准确地识别这些词汇，避免误切分。

需要特别说明的是：

1. 同一个外文名字可能有多种中文写法，有时并无对错之分，选择哪一种可能反映使用者的年龄、地域或文化背景； 在极少数情况下，选错译名甚至可能冒犯他人。因此，本数据集仅为描述性记录 （记录实际用法），不具权威性，请勿用它来批评他人翻译。
2. 多个不同的外文名字有时会音译为相同的中文写法，因此反向查询时可能产生歧义。

本数据集中的词条均来自公开可查的网络使用实例（通过大型中文搜索引擎验证），已排除个人笔记中可能涉及版权或争议的内容。目前收录的词条占我2009–2025年收集总量的81%，已确认可自由使用（即属于“公共领域”）。欢迎将这些词条集成到词典软件（如Pleco、Wenlin）、NLP 工具或在线服务中，以提升中文学习者的阅读体验。若您的产品已使用本数据集，欢迎发邮件告知，我将在本页致谢。

本仓库包含以下文件：

• cedpane： 主词表，制表符分隔，字段包括英文原文、简体中文、繁体中文、普通话拼音、粤语耶鲁拼音（暂未充分校对）、英语IPA 音标。
• PD-English-Definitions： 另一份补充词表，包含常见汉字词的简明英文释义，适合开发注释工具。
• word-overrides： 建议在词典中停用的易误匹配词。

尽管我已尽力校对，但错误仍可能存在（如同所有词典一样），欢迎提出修正建议。

Legal

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