Transcription vs. transliteration vs. translation in cartography

In this post, I wanted to do something that I thought would be fairly simple, viz., address the question of the "rectification" of Russian place names in areas proximate to populations speaking Sinitic languages.  This sort of rectification is also a hot topic where Russia borders on Ukraine.  There, however, the task is simpler, because Russian and Ukrainian are both written in Cyrillic, whereas, in the Russo-Sinitic case, the former is written in the phonetic Cyrillic alphabet, while the latter is written in morphosyllabic Sinoglyphs, a completely different type of writing system.

Everywhere we encounter references to the transliteration of Chinese characters into alphabetic scripts (or vice versa), whereas I maintain that cannot be done because the Sinitic writing system doesn't have any letters that can be transferred over into the letters of an alphabetic script.  Consequently, when talking about the conversion of Sinoglyphic writing to alphabetic scripts, I always speak of it as transcription.

Technically, transliteration is concerned primarily with accurately representing the graphemes of another script, whilst transcription is concerned primarily with representing its phonemes.

(ScriptSource)

The matter at hand has to do with China's Ministry of Natural Resources (Zìrán zīyuán bù 自然资源部) issuing a list of eight locations on the Russia side of the border for which on maps, along with the commonly used transcription of the Russian name, the traditional Chinese names should appear. For example, Blagovéshchensk's transcription in characters is Bùlāgēwéishēnsīkè 布拉戈維申斯克, but its traditional Chinese name Hǎilánpào 海蘭泡 should also appear. This has led to lots of online chatter about the intention, though some netizens also pointed out that it merely codifies an existing practice. Ministry of Natural Resources announcement: The eight locations are: Vladivostok Ussuriysk Khabarovsk Blagovéshchensk Sakhalin Nerchinsk Nikolayevsk Stanovoy Range

Some such border towns have very interesting names.  For instance, the Russian town of Kyakhta during Qing rule of Mongolia was called Mǎimài chéng 买卖城 (lit., "City of Buying and Selling"; "Trade Town"), in Mongolian Худалдаачин.

 

Selected readings

• "Sino-Russian Transcription and Transliteration" (9/17/08)
• "Transcription and digraphia in the rapidly changing linguistic landscape of China" (10/24/20) — with a long bibliography
• "What're Ukraine About?" (3/6/14)
• "Ukrainian is not Russian" (7/26/21)
• "Rusyn" (3/22/22)
• "'Little Russian'" (3/17/22) — with short bibliography on Ukrainian
• "From Rusyn / Ruthenian and Ukrainian, and on to Russian" (3/25/22)
• "Rashist" (4/15/22)
• "War-induced language change" (9/7/22)
• "Ukrainian is not Russian" (7/26/21)

[Thanks to Ross Darrell Feingold]