I am reading "TCH’OUEN TS’IOU ET TSO TCHOUAN, t. II " from fcharton's valuable websites. Names in this book is in Wade Giles, I guess. Could anyone tell me are there any websites convert Wade Giles into Pinyin or into direct Chinese characters (traditional)?

Secondly, is this translation, in French, accurate enough to rely?

Thanks

Try this tool for converting Wade Giles into Pinyin:

http://www.mandarintools.com/pyconverter.html



Fcharton is the best person to answer this.

Not Wade Giles, EFEO, an old variant of it, in fact. You can find tables to help, but note that the pronounciations in these books are somewhat ancient, ie not always consistent with modern putonghua. For instance, it retains the existence of two pronounciations for the pinyin "j" (one a "j", one a like "k", you can still hear such difference in some dialects, in Shadong notably), two slightly different pronounciations for pinyin "x" (transcribed as 'h' and 's') and so on... But don't be afraid, one gets usd to it.

The translation is by Seraphin Couvreur, a Jesuit who lived in China in the late 19th and early 20th century, author of a dictionnary of classical chinese still in use in many schools, and translators of almost all the 13 classics. It is a bit old and dated, and sometimes use old editions (eg the Palace series), which are not those we have nowadays, but it is quite reliable.

Some old editions of Couvreur feature a trilingual translation of the classics, in chinese, latin and french. If you know some latin, they can be useful for passages where the french gets tough... If you intend to read the Zuozhuan, and have some knowledge of chinese, it is a good think to follow on a modern commented edition. I would recommend the edition commented by Yang Bojun, which is relatively easy to find in chinese bookstores (and to download on P2P networks...), classical chinese, plus very rich notes. Avoid the translations into modern chinese, though, they tend to be relatively poor.

Francois