I've noticed that Kong Jie's name is usually spelled in Hangul as 콩지에, but have seen it on 바둑TV spelled as 쿵제. Are there different systems to translate Chinese names to Hangul in a similar way to our plethora of Romanization systems?

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"Those who calculate greatly will win; those who calculate only a little will lose, but what of those who don't make any calculations at all!? This is why everything must be calculated, in order to foresee victory and defeat."-The Art of War

No....its just bad translating on their part. They should just use the characters rather than hangul-ize. Like our Alphabet, Hangul is a phonetic system.

If I, as a more or less native speaker of Korean had to take a stab, I'd say the BTV spelling was correct.

Interesting... the other spelling seems much more common though.

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"Those who calculate greatly will win; those who calculate only a little will lose, but what of those who don't make any calculations at all!? This is why everything must be calculated, in order to foresee victory and defeat."-The Art of War

Actually, I think that 콩지에 is more common these days. In any case, the thing is, when they try to write the name in hangeul, the goal is to make it sound as close to the original language as possible. Some people have different ideas on how to do this.

I think that the first time they started writing his name, 쿵제 sounded like a close representation of the chinese characters used for his name. But later it came to be thought that 콩지에 sounded closer to the chinese pronunciation of his name.

Basically, it's a foreign name, so they just try their best to get a sound that sounds accurate.

Another example is Cho U, which is sometimes written as 장쉬 in Korean. The pinyin for his name is Zhāng Xù, so maybe they thought that 장쉬 was a close approximation to his real name.

Anyway, they just try to get a close sound to the real name.

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be immersed

So there is no standard Chinese to Korean rule system then?

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"Those who calculate greatly will win; those who calculate only a little will lose, but what of those who don't make any calculations at all!? This is why everything must be calculated, in order to foresee victory and defeat."-The Art of War

The standard rule is to make the pronunciation as close as possible to the "real" pronunciation. That's because, if you make a rule to convert characters X to hangeul Y, it will be incorrect in some cases.

For example, I could spell my name "Kirby", and say that it is pronounced "Kai-ehr-bee". I could also say that it is pronounced "Kehr-bee". This is because some languages have ambiguous pronunciation. Because of this, the goal is to make the sound as close as possible to the "real" pronunciation.

However, this way of doing things is only about 20 years old, so this causes some confusion. It used to be more of a standard character to hangeul translation for a lot of things. But some people think that trying to achieve something closer to the "real" pronunciation, despite language ambiguities in spelling, is best. Because of this, you'll sometimes see names that were converted to hangeul only using the characters, disregarding the native pronunciation of the name, and then you'll see the same name somewhere else written to accomodate the real pronunciation.

For your reference, here's a guide you can use to guess on a way to write something in hangeul from chinese:
http://ko.wikipedia.org/wiki/%EC%9C%84% ... D%EC%96%B4

It doesn't include all character combinations, but provides a rough idea of how things are sometimes converted.

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be immersed

The thing about Hangul and Korean names is that there is a preference for 3 syllable names.

Very few Koreans have two syllable names.

They may not also realize that jie is pronounced 'jyeh' as in one syllable. So when they try to reproduce the name in hangul its natural for them to do it in 3 syllables.

I like the baduk tv version because that translator probably realized this and made the jie into a one syllable pieve.

PGWM