Use of polyphonic characters in transliteration The pronunciation of polyphonic character is usually deduced from the semantic of the context. In a transliterated word, there is no such context, the character only stands for its pronunciation, so it seems not a good idea to use polyphonic characters for that purpose.

However they are used in transliteration. For example 什 is extensively used for Russian names. More interestingly, there seems to be an agreement that in transliteration, its less common pronunciation shi2 is always used instead of the more common shen2.

So my questions are, in transliteration field,


Is there any guidelines around/against using polyphonic characters?
How does one decide which pronunciation is the 'agreed' one to use?
Is there any polyphonic character, of which multiple pronunciations are used for transliteration?
Yes, there are guidelines. We won't get confused in the 什 example because PRC had long contact with Russia, but we may get confused for some unfamiliar countries.

Note that this guideline is only made and followed by authors and editors in mainland China. Taiwan and Hong Kong all have their own standards due to divergence in pronounciation. Whatsmore, Hongkong-neses prefer reading and writing in Cantonese.



From the table, you can see that we use different characters for different syllables according to which language it is.