Overview

What is this tool?

The CSET-ETO Chinese Technical Glossary provides English translations and annotations for over 15,000 specialized terms found in Chinese primary sources on technology and security, including scientific and technical terminology, legal terminology, financial terminology, Chinese political rhetoric, idiomatic expressions, and the names of companies, government agencies, and other proper nouns. Terms in the Glossary are sourced from CSET's continuously expanding corpus of Chinese-to-English translations, with new entries added several times a week. Ben Murphy, CSET's translation manager, is the sole creator and final arbiter of the content of this Glossary.

How do I access it?

The Glossary is available as a public, searchable Google sheet. Launch the Glossary here.

What are its sources?

The Chinese terms in the Glossary are derived from the Chinese source documents in CSET's corpus of Chinese-to-English translations. CSET's translation manager created the English translations and translator’s notes, with reference to resources such as the MDBG Chinese-English Dictionary, Wikipedia, and Baidu Encyclopedia (百度百科).

What are its main limitations?

• The Glossary isn't comprehensive. Although it includes thousands of entries, it doesn't cover every term that may appear in Chinese documents relevant to technology and security.
• The Glossary has uneven coverage of different types of specialized terminology. The terms in the Glossary are all derived from CSET-produced Chinese-to-English translations, and are therefore concentrated on topics of interest to CSET, such as artificial intelligence and biotechnology.
• This Glossary does not include all the alternate renderings of each Chinese term. Chinese companies, government agencies, scientific research institutes, and other proper nouns often have multiple abbreviations and alternate names. This glossary includes some of these alternate versions of Chinese terms, but not all.
• The English translations in this glossary are not necessarily grammatical. The Chinese language lacks grammatical constructs such as verb tenses, conjugations, and plurals. A single Chinese word can often be a verb, noun, or other part of speech depending on context, without any modification of the word itself. Therefore, when using one of the English translations in this Glossary, the user should modify the tense, conjugation, singular or plural, or part of speech of the translation to conform to English grammar.
• Many of the English translations in the Glossary are tentative. CSET's translation manager is not an expert on most of the technical disciplines implicated by terms in the Glossary, which could lead to translation errors. Many of the Chinese entities in the Glossary, such as companies, government agencies, and investment funds, lack official English names, making any translations of these provisional. And Chinese Communist Party political catchphrases are notoriously difficult to translate into English, even for experts, due to grammatical and cultural differences.
• This Glossary contains errors. Because the Glossary is manually maintained, errors such as typos, omissions, duplicates, and inconsistencies across entries may arise. If you find an error in the Glossary, please let us know so we can fix it.

What are the terms of use?

This dataset is made available under a Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0 license. If you use it, please cite us.

How do I cite it?

Please cite the "CSET-ETO Chinese Technical Glossary," including the link, and credit Ben Murphy as the author. Here is a sample citation:

Murphy, Ben. “CSET-ETO Chinese Technical Glossary.” Last accessed [date]. https://glossary.eto.tech.

Structure and content

Each entry in the Glossary has the following fields:

• Chinese term. A term can be a single character, a word, or a phrase. Common abbreviations of the term are included in the Chinese term field in parentheses. If the term has an alternate form that is not an abbreviation, the alternate form has its own, separate entry in the Glossary. Each Chinese term entry in the Glossary is unique.
• English translation. If there are multiple viable English translations for a single Chinese term, these are included in this field as alternatives following the most common or preferred translation. Abbreviations, if any, are included in parentheses following the preferred and alternate translations. Some English translations map to more than one Chinese term; in other words, not every English translation entry in the Glossary is unique. As a rule, each translation of the name of a Chinese company, government agency, research institute, or other entity in this Glossary uses the entity’s own official English name, if one exists, as per its website or other official source. CSET's translation manager has made exceptions to this rule for a handful of entries, to correct misspellings or ungrammatical English, to accord with commonly recognized English renderings of names ("Chinese Communist Party" rather than the official "Communist Party of China," for example), or to avoid misleading names ("Central Propaganda Department" rather than the official "Central Publicity Department," for example).
• Translator’s notes. Additional notes about context, history, or other pertinent information about the term and its translation are included here. CSET's translation manager wrote these, with reference to resources such as Wikipedia and Baidu Encyclopedia (百度百科). Where the translation manager is unsure of the correct English translation, this field includes "tentative translation" or a similar caveat.
• Pinyin. The Mandarin pronunciation of the Chinese term, written in Hanyu Pinyin (汉语拼音) Romanization with a space between each syllable. Tone marks for each syllable are indicated with a number from 1 to 4; toneless syllables are indicated with the number 0.
• Last modified. The date when the entry was most recently edited. If the entry has never been edited after its initial addition to the Glossary, this date refers to the date the entry was added. CSET's translation manager created this Glossary in 2019, but did not add the "last modified" field until July 2021; thus many of the entries from 2021 were in fact added to the Glossary in 2019 or 2020.

Sources and methodology

The Chinese terms in the Glossary are derived from the Chinese source documents in CSET's corpus of Chinese-to-English translations. CSET's translation manager created the English translations and translator’s notes, with reference to resources such as the MDBG Chinese-English Dictionary, Wikipedia, and Baidu Encyclopedia (百度百科).

CSET's translation manager is the sole creator and final arbiter of the content of the Glossary.

Maintenance

How is it updated?

CSET's translation manager updates the underlying data, adding new entries and revising existing entries, on an ad hoc basis - typically daily.

Credits

The CSET-ETO Chinese Technical Glossary is maintained by Ben Murphy. Chenxi Liu assisted with Pinyin romanization. Zach Arnold contributed to this documentation and configured the Glossary's public interface.

Major change log