Traditional Chinese Pinyin Annotator

Annotate Traditional Chinese with phonetics

Learners of Traditional Chinese often need a pronunciation guide above each character. This annotator wraps your text in standard HTML ruby markup, placing either zhuyin fuhao (bopomofo, the Taiwan standard) or Hanyu Pinyin above each Han character so the preview reads like a textbook.

Zhuyin vs Pinyin: which should you choose?

This annotator offers two phonetic systems. The right choice depends on your audience:

Zhuyin fuhao (注音符號), also called bopomofo, is the phonetic system used in Taiwan. Primary school children in Taiwan learn zhuyin before they learn Chinese characters, so zhuyin annotations are the standard in Taiwan-published textbooks, children’s books and learning materials. The symbols — ㄅㄆㄇ… — bear no resemblance to Latin letters, which eliminates confusion between the phonetic annotation and the text itself.

Hanyu Pinyin uses the Latin alphabet with tone marks (ā á ǎ à) and is the standard in mainland China, most international Chinese-language textbooks and language-learning apps. Pinyin is more familiar to learners with a Western-language background.

Choose zhuyin for Taiwan-facing educational materials; choose pinyin for everything else.

How annotation works

Each character is looked up in a built-in table that maps common Traditional Chinese characters to their reading:

為每個漢字  →  <ruby>為<rt>ㄨㄟˋ</rt></ruby><ruby>每<rt>ㄇㄟˇ</rt></ruby> …

The tool walks your text one character at a time, looks up its reading, and wraps it in a ruby element with an rt (ruby text) element for the annotation. Punctuation and unknown characters are passed through unchanged. The result is shown as a live rendered preview and as copyable HTML markup you can paste into your own page.

Polyphonic characters: what to watch

Many Traditional Chinese characters have more than one reading depending on the word they appear in. The annotator shows the most common reading — which is correct most of the time — but should be proofread where the rarer reading applies:

For published educational materials, always proofread polyphonic characters manually. All processing happens locally in your browser, so nothing you paste is sent anywhere.