29 Mar, 2024

An open meeting of the Olexa Horbatsch Orthography Seminar was held during the UCU days in Lviv on 12 September 2019

During the UCU days in Lviv on 12 September 2019, practical Chinese-Ukrainian transcription system was presented and compared with other Cyrillic (Russian, Serbian, and Bulgarian) transcriptions. The system was developed at the Olexa Horbatsch Orthography Seminar run by the UCU Department of Philology. The meeting was opened by Ulana Holovatch, who presented the general principles for writing proper names borrowed from other languages into Ukrainian. These principles were previously worked out by the seminar participants as a result of processing linguistic data from multiple languages. Juri Durkot spoke about Transliterator—a computer program which is being developed for automatically transcribing foreign proper names in Ukrainian. The program is a practical implementation of the Kirnosova-Tsisar Chinese-Ukrainian transcription system. The program receives Chinese proper names in pinyin as input and outputs their Ukrainian spelling following the above system, which is the first independent system for transcription from Chinese into Ukrainian. It has already been adopted by the Safran Publishers and applied to transcribe proper names in the Ukrainian translation of the Zhuangzi, a foundational Daocist text.