help with chinese genealogical terms and relations

[yosibeck]

Hi,

I'm a programmer for an open-source free web-based genealogy program.
Our next version will have a Chinese interface (thanks to a volunteer translator) and we are adjusting the program to cater for Chinese users, such as date display as 1998-02-23 instead of 23 Feb 1998, displaying names only in lastname-firstname sequence, searching by one character etc.
Presently I am working on adjusting the relationship calculator for Chinese.
At the moment, in English the calculator knows to present a chart and then say "Person A is the 4th great-grandson of Person B" (in the Chinese way this would read: "Person A's 4th great-grandfather is Person B") and "Person A is the 3rd cousin once removed of Person B". 

However our Chinese translator has difficulty defining how to deal with these more complicated relations in Chinese.
What I got so far is:
grandfather, great-grandfather, 2nd great-grandfather: 祖父, 曾祖父, 高祖父.  But how does one go on with 3rd, 4th, 5th etc??
Is there a way to do this with numbers (whether western or Chinese) so that one can program automatically "Person A's 5th great-grandfather is Person B"
like 第四高祖父 (=fourth Gāo zǔfù) or is this nonsense in Chinese?
Same for grandmother, grandson, granddaughter (祖母, 曾祖母, 高祖母,  孙子, 曾孙, 玄孙, 孙女, 曾孙女, 玄孙女). How to continue after 2nd automatically?.

Then the more complicated ones:
- How does one say "cousin", "2nd cousin", "7th cousin" etc
- How does one go in Chinese about "3rd cousin twice removed" (i.e. 2nd great-grandfather/mother of A and grandfather/mother of B are siblings)
- How does one say uncle, granduncle, great-granduncle, 4th great-granduncle etc
- How does one say nephew/niece, grand-nephew, great-grand-nephew, 7th great-grandnephew.

Does anyone know of a website where these relations are described in English and Chinese ??
OR can someone advise me on this forum how to go about this.

We would like our free program to be as user-friendly as possible to Chinese users.

Thanks, 谢谢
Yossi

[kjhong]

Try Liu Yao's blog post on Chinese terms for family relationships. It's 90% in Chinese, but it also includes two charts one in English and one in Chinese that shows these relationships.

zongzu.wordpress.com/2011/06/25/%E5%90%8C%E5%B9%B4%E9%BD%92%E9%8C%84/

Others on the forum with better Chinese language skills than me, including Liu Yao, should be able to provide more elaborations if needed.

[Doug 周]

Please consider these two sites also:

Chinese kinship terms - detailed table via A Kwan Family Website 關氏網點

Chinese Kinship Titles By William Kiejan Tong

[liuyao]

That would be a great news to Chinese genealogists. Are you an existing website? I'd be interested to check it out.

I have been thinking a lot of what would be best for such a system for Chinese. I think there is a fundamental difference when a Chinese speaks of genealogy from virtually everyone else. In the West, each person regards himself as the center, and seeks out all the ancestors in relation to him. Each person is an independent individual who directly speaks to God, which is at the very core of Western civilization. In China, each person is (or was) first and foremost a member of his family (which does NOT include cousins having different surnames). So Chinese genealogy takes a top-down approach: the first identifiable patriarch of the family (or more often the first one to settle down at a new village) is given the most attention, and everyone else is treated in relation to him, as the #th-generation descendent (#世孫).

[yosibeck]

Thank you all very much. The links are very helpful.
Liu Yao, our program HuMo-gen is free and open-source and anyone with a domain name and server can install it to run his own genealogical website.
I will make an example Chinese site and post a link here, once more gets translated and when the relationship calculator will be better equipped with Chinese terminology, thanks to everyone's help.
You can read up about the program and its many features on humogen.com
For now, you can see an example of the program (still without Chinese, because that will only be included in the next version) on my personal website beck.org.il. Once you choose a person ("Family Trees --> Individuals" from the main menu), next to his name is an icon with all possible reports and charts. Under "Tools --> Relationship Calculator" on the main menu, you will find the calculator that can show a chart how two people are connected, with a caption that tells the relationship also in words (and that's why I addressed this forum). For example you can search with persons A and B and the outcome of the graph might say: "A is the third cousin twice removed of B".
If more people are interested, then anyone can help with the Chinese translation online on Transifex. At the moment only one person deals with this and 30% of all text has been translated into Simplified Chinese, 20% into Traditional Chinese. These are the most commonly used terms, but still much has to be translated.
Translation is done on: www.transifex.com/organization/humo-gen (needs free registration there). Simplified Chinese is done under the caption "Chinese (China)" and traditional Chinese under the caption "Chinese (Mandarin)". (Don't ask why - those are the names in Transifex, the names don't matter for our program.
I will update with a Chinese sample site when ready.
Thanks again,
Yossi