With more than 9,000 entries, the Cheng & Tsui English-Chinese Lexicon of Business Terms with Pinyin is a welcome addition to the bookshelf of anyone doing business in or with China or another Mandarin-speaking area. The bulk of the Lexicon is devoted to common business vocabulary, business-related legal terms, and ordinary words that are often used in banking, finance, insurance, international trade, real estate, and stocks and bonds.
Entries range from the relatively straightforward, such as "debt" and "savings," to words and concepts that are more difficult to translate, such as "rain check," "tombstone ad," "make a killing," "scab," and "foreclosure proceedings," to the occasional Latin term, such as "lis pendens." Each English entry is followed by a direct translation into simplified Chinese characters, which is followed by romanization in pinyin with tone marks. Many entries have two or more translations into Chinese, separated either by commas or semicolons--words separated by commas are near synonyms, while those separated by semicolons have different meanings and are used in different contexts. Unfortunately, however, the tome lacks examples that put the words into context, which could frustrate users confronted with several different translations of one English term.
The Lexicon also includes several extremely useful appendices containing specialized vocabulary. The appendix on information technology and e-business is divided into three sections: telecommunications and video, networks and e-business, and computers and peripherals. Again, terms range from the common, such as "browser" and "cable television," to the more technical, such as "asynchronous transfer mode," "ethernet," and "dynamic random access memory." The financial statements appendix covers balance sheets, cash flow statements, and income and profit-and-loss statements.
Anyone who has struggled to convert large Chinese numbers into English equivalents will appreciate the third appendix, which lists the main units of Chinese counting, in both characters and numerals, up to one trillion. It also gives examples of various numbers in both numerals and characters, commonly used expressions, fractions, and decimals. The first part of the final appendix, which covers dining out, reads like a Chinese menu but progresses to words for smell, taste, and texture and a section on healthy requests--including useful terms such as "decaffeinated," "diabetic meal," "salt-free," and "vegetarian," among others.
Andrew Chang, professor emeritus of Chinese and Japanese at Thunderbird, the American Graduate School of International Management in Glendale, Arizona, has put together an English-Chinese business dictionary handy for students, researchers, and businesspeople alike. This reviewer hopes a Chinese-English version will appear soon.
--Virginia A. Hulme