Gramps - open source genealogy - attempting dual Chinese/Eng

[graham]

Having come back from China having located my father's ancestral village I've been asked to collect the names of my grandfather's descendants to add to the family tree.
From what I can see there isn't much in the way of software that caters specifically for a bilingual audience.  I want to enter English for the names of people, and Chinese names as well when known.

I have found Gramps which has my main criterion of being open source.
It does have limitations but that's true for all of them.  It only allows for Preferred, Birth Names, AKA, Married Name, nick and unknown.  It seems you can add more than one of each except Preferred Name.

What I have done so far is:

1. Enter the English name we know the person by in the Preferred Name field
2. In the AKA fields, enter the Chinese surname, and also the given Chinese names
3. Enter any literary names (eg. pseudonyms ) in the nick field

Now the problem arises when people don't have a Preferred English Name.  For that I'm using Pinyin of the Chinese characters of their given name.  That isn't appropriate for people from Guangzhou but I don't have a way to do a Chinese to Cantonese.

Printing is a problem as none of the print outs I have seen so far display the alternate names, so it's useful for the purpose of sending the file to China.

I tried generating a Graphviz output, added the Chinese names to the graph, and then convert to PDF but the chinese characters don't display.  This appears to be a font issue with the Postscript code.  I found an online graphviz to PDF converter but it also makes mistakes with the Chinese.

So, what I am doing is exporting the data as Gedcom, then with a script I go through and add the full Chinese name to the Preferred Name and create a new gedcom file.  I then import that as a new family tree into Gramps, and then I can print off reports with both the anglo and Chinese characters.  Also i can replace the preferred names completely with Chinese but that's confusing for me since I don't read Chinese.

I just now have to track down the Chinese names for late cousins' children and add them.  That's trickier as they don't know what they are!

[Doug 周]

Graham,

Some clarifications on your task ahead:

I've been asked to collect the names of my grandfather's descendants to add to the family tree.

Are you collating all the descendants of your grandfather to add to the analog repository of your clan at the ancestral village (zupu 族谱). I would guesstimate about 100 persons? Do you really need a family tree program to do that? Would not a text file, or even a spreadsheet be easier?

but I don't have a way to do a Chinese to Cantonese

Wouldn't Yale/Jyutping Cantonese romanization be appropriate? If your relatives spoke SzeYup or Fujian/Hokkien, there might be romanizations protocols for those sub-dialects. Otherwise I would label the names phonetic spelling.

I then import that as a new family tree into Gramps, and then I can print off reports with both the anglo and Chinese

Are you using the internal Gramps printing module?

Please email me via the contact in my profile.There are some details with which I would like to help. Having a non Forum dialog might be easier.

~doug

[graham]

Doug,

Yes, a spreadsheet would do but it's way easier I think to see the tree and what might be missing if I have a descendant view. And yes, it's about 120 names so far. I might as well also convert the limited written version they gave me to gedcom format.

As for Cantonese I guess I could do some Yale romanization but then I don't speak the language, and I can read pinyin out so it helps me if I can do this mentally to know where I am.

Yes, I am using Gramps printing module. I'll email you if something is off topic.

[graham]

I found this site cantonese.org/ which has an online dictionary licensed under creative commons, and allows one to input Chinese and output a pronunciation.

[Doug 周]

MDBG ^click is my goto site for translation, pinyin and Yale/Jyutping romanization, as well as traditional and simplified fonts. The latter of which you will need yet another name field.
Search engines like Baidu and Google will search for both traditional and simplified at the same time, keeping the search protocols seamless.

[graham]

That's an interesting site. I learnt about Cangjie!