Homophones and Tonal Patterns in English-Chinese Transliteration

摘要

The abundance of homophones in Chinese significantly increases the number of similarly acceptable candidates in English-to-Chinese transliteration (E2C). The dialectal factor also leads to different transliteration practice. We compare E2C between Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese, and report work in progress for dealing with homophones and tonal patterns despite potential skewed distributions of individual Chinese characters in the training data.