I was wondering if anyone else got slightly annoyed at the territory names when playing East Asia. Maybe nobody else notices or cares, but the majority of the territory names in China seem to be made up, or at best translations of the original names.

For example, when looking at GuangXi (S China, near Hainan) one of the territories is called Gveilinz, when the correct name is actually GuiLin. Also in that province is Namzningz, which should be NanNing. Then you have names like "Fortress Port" and "Willow County", which I assume are translations of the county names. These are only examples, most of China has the same problem (in my mind) with territory names.

Does anyone else care? If it's possible, and I had some instruction, I would be more than happy to slowly correct all of these county-level territory names.

I had honestly never noticed.. but I don't tend to notice territ names often so..

Fizzer might be willing to let you adopt the map.. Idk if the maker is inactive or not

The map-maker is obiously not chinese...otherwise the phonetic punctuation of terrotires would be better. I could help with this as well...however my chinese is only average-like, since i'm English by birth.

I agree with you Texas however...that the translations should be better, if anything.

If you want to invest the time and can get permission, go for it.

I'd like to help too.

Pudong and Puxi in Shanghai have been translated to Pu East and Pu West. The etymology of the names is very complex so read the following slowly and carefully...

Dong = east
Xi = west

Pudong is east of the Huangpu river and Puxi is west of the Huangpu river.

Got it?

To aid further, I've found a map that might illustrate the point a little more clearly. Let me know if it's too detailed though.

Map can be found here:
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If you start changing the names on the warlight map, these would be an easy fix.

And now, my help is over.

Good luck Texas. But if you change the names, some suggestions:

- use pinyin for China (and follow pinyin's rules: eg, Guanxi not GuanXi, Guilin not GuiLin, Xi'an not Xi'An or Xian - note how xi'an represents two characters, while xian without the punctuation is just one character?)
- use Wade-Giles for Taiwan
- use the wacky Chinglish system for Hong Kong

Honestly, I don't know how serious I am about this. I don't know the first thing about making maps. If I was to get permission to adopt the map, what steps are involved in something like changing territory names? This really isn't something most people unfamiliar with China would care about (just look at Perrin's post), and it certainly wouldn't affect gameplay (I am not looking for missing connections, etc, just wanting to make asthetic changes).

Evreux, I am a bit confused. I understand what you mean about the "wacky Chinglish system of HK (ie Lowu instead of Luohu), but what is this Wade-Giles you speak of? And is it really proper pinyin to say Guilin instead of GuiLin? Often when chatting online to Chinese people, they tend to capitalize the first letter of each character, as opposed to just the beginning of the word. Obviously I bow to your expertise in the matter.

You click the territory, and then change the name in the Warlight editor. Bonuses are slightly trickier (but not much)

I thought Lowu was the Guangdonghua to Luohu's Putonghua, not really an example of any wacky Hong Kong Chinglish system. Might be wrong though.

It's definitely Guilin, not Gui Lin (but in Hong Kong Cantonese the standard is in fact to separate and capitalize each characterm, so Lo Wu, not Lowu). Wade-Giles is an older system for transliterating Chinese names still used in Taiwan - hence Taipei rather than Taibei, and Kaohsiung rather than Gaoxiong. You'll also recognize it from spellings like Yangtze, Mao Tse-tung and Szechwan.

changing territory names is the easiest part about mapmaking i think. chinese themselves probably dont know a few of the 'rules' of pinyin (largely used by sinologists), bc they use the characters themselves instead when communicating with each other. i'd suspect they adopt english grammar rules at times. in general, if there are two characters in a place name, they go together (Beijing instead of Bei Jing, Shanghai instead of Shang Hai).

hk's wacky system: places named by the english are in english (with chinese characters), other places named by the chinese-speakers are in their system (with the characters). so i think of it as chinglish in this respect.

taiwan uses a lot of writing systems (wade-giles, pinyin, others) depending on the area. here in taipei, the city government has made all new signs using pinyin. but they will never change taipei to taibei i think. traditional characters and the use of the word 'taipei' seem to be a symbolic source of pride to differentiate themselves from china (and for some, a way to show they are more authentically chinese).

So what needs to happen to make this a reality? Contact the map designer of the East Asia map? What if the designer has disappeared? I know there were some changes made to Big USA, was that with the original designer's permission?

Big US got adopted by another player with Fizzer's permission.. email fizzer and ask to adopt the map.

I will e-mail Fizzer soon to see if I can get permission to change the map.

To anyone who is interested, during a random Wikipedia search of Guilin, I saw that in the Standard Zhuang language, Guilin is actually spelled (pronounced?) Gveilinz. It is possible that the map-maker decided to go with the traditional local spellings of some places. This is more acceptable than naming in German or something, which is what I thought was the case. Still, I think it would be nice to change all of the Chinese territories to the proper Pinyin names. Don't worry Gui, I will ask for you advice in renaming the territories in Taiwan Province, if needed.

I'm not Chinese, so I'm not sure about this, but two territories in Guizhou have very weird names: Qianfxiynanf Ziqziqzouy and Qianfnanf Ziqziqzouy. Is that even Chinese?
Qianfxiynanf?

It's certainly not Chinese, at least not proper Mandarin/Pinyin. I would assume it is possibly an issue of a local language being used, as I showed in my example with Gulin/Gveilinz. China is a big country, perhaps the designer didn't feel a need to accurately name all of the territories?

John... my missus is Zhuang. I've just shown her that spelling for Guilin and she has no idea! I guess she just learnt the standard pinyin.

Although the v after the G maybe isn't so far fetched if you look at this.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100102024202AADhNz0

Every day is a learning day, eh?

I knew she was a minority, wasn't sure what kind. I reckon most "minority" people in China are just typical Chinese, they don't really pay much attention to minority culture, except as a way to fleece tourists.