Talk:Table of General Standard Chinese Characters

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Section sizes

Section size for Table of General Standard Chinese Characters (5 sections)
Section name	Byte count	Section total
(Top)	1,453	1,453
Non-BMP characters	19,821	19,821
See also	816	816
References	1,112	1,112
External links	193	193
Total	23,395	23,395

Requested move 17 June 2024[edit]

It has been proposed in this section that Table of General Standard Chinese Characters be renamed and moved to List of Commonly Used Standard Chinese Characters.

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Table of General Standard Chinese Characters → List of Commonly Used Standard Chinese Characters – "General" is an unnatural translation for 通用, which means "commonly used" or perhaps "in general use". I wouldn't be able to understand the current translation without additional context. The English title of the related document Stroke Orders of the Commonly Used Standard Chinese Characters is official, and it would make most sense to reflect that for consistency.

The Chinese word 表 is admittedly ambiguous. I'm not tied to using "list" instead of "table", but I understand the document as a numbered list, not a table; that is, I don't think the document is meant to draw meaningful correspondences between the numbers and the characters, but merely to list them out with indices. Also, List of Commonly Used Characters in Modern Chinese has been translated as "list" (and as "commonly used"), and I think we should maintain consistency by renaming one of the articles. pacificboy (talk) 04:25, 17 June 2024 (UTC) — Relisting. Bensci54 (talk) 16:58, 1 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I should also add that I couldn’t find any existing English translations from reliable sources, either in the media or scholarship. pacificboy (talk) 05:41, 17 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Now I've gone and looked myself. Found two:

Yu LI's The Chinese Writing System in Asia (2020) translates it as List of Standardized Characters for General Use.
LI Yuming's The Language Situation in China (2014) translates it as Table of General Standard Chinese Characters, the article title.

Remsense诉 12:24, 17 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

A couple more:

Shouhui Zhao & Guowen Shang's "Language planning agency in China: from the perspective of the language academies" (2016) translates it as Comprehensive Table of Standardization
Jiajin Xu's "Corpus-based Chinese studies: A historical review from the 1920s to the present" (2015) translates it as ‘A General Service List of Chinese Characters’ (quoted, not italicized)

These two translations are both imprecise (通用 refers to the characters, not the list). There definitely doesn't seem to be a scholarly consensus. pacificboy (talk) 16:10, 17 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The new name "List of Commonly Used Standard Chinese Characters" sounds more consistent with article List of Commonly Used Characters in Modern Chinese, the predecessor of the former . However, if changed, the present name should be kept as a redirect. And all relevant articles such as those in the See also section should be renamed accordingly. Is it cost-effective?

Btw, I added a redirect "Commonly Used Standard Chinese Characters" to the page a few days ago. Ctxz2323 (talk) 02:41, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I'm happy to do the renaming work if this goes through. After consideration, though, I think it might make more sense to simply use pinyin titles for this and many of the related articles, since they're specialized documents that haven't seen much discussion in English-language publications and don't have established English titles. (See, for instance, the Wikipedia title for Xiandai Hanyu Guifan Cidian.) I still think "general" is a terrible, meaningless translation for 通用, but I'm not particularly tied to my proposed title, especially after seeing that existing publications all translate it in different ways. pacificboy (talk) 16:53, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I almost think it makes more sense for recognizability to consider descriptive titles rather than official ones (e.g. "2013 PRC character standard"—no idea how it would be written precisely) Remsense诉 16:55, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]