Non-native missionaries called to Chinese-speaking missions
face a problem unique to Chinese: the inability to read or directly
use the scriptures in their mission language until well into their
missionary service, if at all.  Chinese does not use an alphabet and
Chinese characters do not give information on how to be pronounced.
Scriptures annotated with pronunciation would help these missionaries
to overcome the challenges of the unique Chinese writing system,
allowing them to better use the Book of Mormon as a conversion tool
and to better study the Chinese language.  Official approval for a set
of annotated scriptures would be a boon to Chinese-speaking
missionaries.  This proposal describes the difficulties of the Chinese
language, introduces an already completed set of annotated Chinese
scriptures, and details these scripture's potential benefits for
Chinese-speaking missionaries around the world.

	The Chinese writing system uses characters.  Each character
represents a whole syllable in the spoken language which may be a
whole word or part of a word.  The same syllable can be represented by
different characters with different meanings, much like English
homonyms.  However, a character gives no reliable indication of its
own pronunciation.  A reader must memorize the sound and meaning of
each character individually.  Basic literacy requires knowing upwards
of two thousand characters; achieving full literacy requires learning
between three to five thousand characters, a laborious and lengthy
process.  The Book of Mormon in Chinese itself uses around twenty-six
hundred different characters.  New readers must rely heavily on
dictionaries for understanding, but dictionary look-up based on
character shape is a time consuming process, making reading an arduous
endeavor for the beginning to intermediate reader.  Such readers
constitute the bulk of missionaries called to Chinese-speaking
missions.

     While Japanese and Korean use Chinese-derived characters to some
extent, Chinese remains the only modern written language to have no
phonetic component.  However, during this century a Romanization
system called Hanyu Pinyin was developed to accurately reflect the
actual pronunciation of Mandarin Chinese, the dialect spoken by the
majority of the people in the People's Republic of China (PRC) and
Taiwan.  This system, which uses the same Latin alphabet as English,
is used to teach Mandarin to children in the PRC and to non-Chinese
learning the languages.  Few adult Chinese can read or write in Hanyu
Pinyin though and Taiwan does not use it at all, instead using another
pronunciation aid system called National Phonetic Symbols (also called
bopomofo).  Pinyin is taught to all Mandarin-speaking missionaries in
the Missionary Training Center and they leave the MTC able to read and
pronounce pinyin.

     The annotated scriptures build on the missionaries' existing
ability by taking the original Chinese character scripture text and
adding the equivalent pinyin for each character directly above that
character.  Nothing is removed from the Chinese text, the only change
is the addition of the pinyin.  Consequently even a missionary
straight from the MTC could at least read the scriptures out loud,
even if he or she could not understand what they were saying at the
time.  With some practice, they could also follow along with others
reading the text.  Dictionary look-up based on the pronunciation of
a character is also much easier and faster.

     The annotated scriptures would be of enormous help to
missionaries in their day to day proselyting work.  Currently when
missionaries read the scriptures with their investigators they must
follow in English while the investigators read in Chinese.  Annotated
scriptures would allow the missionaries to read right along with their
investigators and follow as the investigators read.  If the
investigator happened to be illiterate, the missionary could read the
scriptures aloud to them, something which is currently impossible for
most missionaries.  Missionaries could more fully participate in
church meetings, being able to read the assigned scriptures and also
contribute scriptures they felt were relevant to the discussion.
Knowing characters can also help missionaries to clarify new concepts
for investigators.  A former missionary to Taiwan recalls he often
showed the written form of gospel-related words to investigators who
had not heard them before.  This is useful because of the high number
of homonyms in Chinese.  Annotated scripture selections have already
been given to Mandarin-speaking missionaries in the Washington,
D.C. mission.  They regularly use these selections in discussions with
their investigators.

     Annotated chapters from the Chinese Book of Mormon have been
discussed and shown to a variety of current and former missionaries as
well as others involved in the missionary effort to the Chinese
people.  All those who have seen or heard of the project think the
annotated scriptures would be a useful tool and have supported
allowing missionaries to use them.  In particular, sample chapters
were shown to three professors of Chinese at Brigham Young University:
Dr. Gary Williams (a former Taiwan mission president), Dr. Dana
Bourgerie (who is active in preparing Chinese learning materials for
missionaries), and Dr. Matthew Christensen.  They supported the
concept and agreed to be contacted if further information is needed.
Br. Ed Burrup in the Translation Department also has a sample and
supports the idea.  Two years ago Corey Neddo (formerly with Asian
Language & Welfare Training at the MTC) said he had contacted twelve
different missions about the annotated scriptures and that most of the
missions were interested in using them.

     The annotated scriptures can also help missionaries in learning
Chinese, both the spoken and written language.  Currently missionaries
have very little reading material they can use early in their
missions.  However, with the annotated scriptures they can do personal
scripture study in Chinese, something that is currently very difficult
for even most advanced missionaries.  Since the annotated scriptures
have the pronunciation above the characters, the combination can serve
as a bridge to eventually using the regular character-only editions of
the scriptures.  Missionaries can exclusively use the pinyin at the
beginning of their missions and then use the pinyin to help them learn
the associated characters later.  The Washington, D.C. missionaries
mentioned above report that using the annotated scriptures has helped
improve their Chinese.

     The practice of adding pronunciation aids to scriptures has
several precedents in the Church.  Most significant of these is in the
Japanese Book of Mormon.  Japanese uses a mixture of Chinese-origin
characters (kanji) and a phonetic script (kana).  The pronunciation of
kanji in the Japanese Book of Mormon is indicated by adding kana on
the side of each kanji.  In Taiwan, the Book of Mormon picture story
books for children use the bopomofo pronunciation aids mentioned
above.  And though not produced by the Church, there is also a
complete Bible with bopomofo available at the Church distribution
center in Taipei.  Seeing that Bible inspired this project.

     The process of annotation does not change the original Chinese
text in any way.  It merely adds the equivalent pinyin above each
character.  The annotation can also optionally add spaces to mark word
boundaries, something that Chinese does not mark normally, but that
can help a new reader.  Annotation is done by a computer program
especially written for the task, with thorough proofreading being done
afterwards to check the results of the program.  Since the annotation
is done automatically it can be done quickly, with less than ten
minutes necessary to process the entire standard works.  The program
can also be run on a variety of computer platforms, allowing it to be
run directly at Church headquarters.  When the new Chinese translation
of the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and Pearl of Great
Price are published they can be quickly annotated directly by the
Church Translation Department without releasing the electronic text to
others.  Using the original copy of the Chinese translation will
ensure the accuracy of the Chinese text.

     Being automated allows for a great deal of flexibility.  The
program can work with either the simplified character variants used in
the PRC and Singapore, or the traditional characters still used in
Taiwan and Hong Kong.  Both the traditional Chinese writing direction
of going top to bottom and right to left and the Western direction of
left to right are available.  Fonts and formats are easily modified.
The program can also produce output using other common Romanization
systems used for Mandarin, such as Yale or Wade-Giles.  Output in
bopomofo, commonly used in Taiwan, is also available.  With further
work and a Cantonese-speaking collaborator, a version based on the
Cantonese dialect used in Hong Kong could also be created.  The output
of the program can be simple non-proprietary HTML as used in web
pages, viewable and printable from a variety of computer operating
systems.  Output as a PDF file, read and printed using the Adobe
Acrobat program, is the preferred format though.

     The annotated scriptures were developed by Erik Peterson, a
member who served as a Mandarin-speaking elder in the Texas Houston
Mission during 1990 and 1991.  After his mission he graduated from
Brigham Young University with a dual major in Chinese and Computer
Science and later obtained a master's degree in linguistics from
Georgetown University.  He has lived in the PRC twice and visited Hong
Kong and Taiwan several times.  The inspiration for annotated
scriptures came during one of these visits to the Taipei Temple and
the Church Distribution center across the street.  Br. Peterson
attended a Chinese branch in the Washington, D.C. area for four years
where he had constant contact with the branch missionaries and went on
team-ups with them.  These missionaries have already been given
various chapters and selections from the annotated Chinese Book of
Mormon and have found them valuable in both missionary work and
learning the language.  Br. Peterson wishes that he could have had
access to a similar resource on his own mission.  Br. Peterson's
specialty is Chinese computing and natural language processing.  He is
currently working on a Ph.D. in computational linguistics at Carnegie
Mellon University.

     Official approval of the pinyin annotated scriptures would be a
great boon to the Chinese missionary effort.  Missionaries in the
three missions in Taiwan, as well as Mandarin-speaking missionaries in
the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong would
benefit from being able to use the annotated scriptures.  Official
approval would allow the annotated scriptures to be distributed to
missionaries in the MTC, ensuring all Chinese-speaking missionaries
have access to this resource.  With this tool, missionaries will be
even more effective in studying the Gospel of Jesus Christ and
communicating it to others in Chinese.