Decolonising Data Systems: Using Jyutping or Pinyin as tonal representations of Chinese names for data linkage

TL;DR

This paper advocates for using standardized tonal romanisation systems like Jyutping and Pinyin for Chinese names to improve data linkage accuracy and reduce bias in health research datasets.

Contribution

It demonstrates that Jyutping and Pinyin reduce errors in Chinese name representation compared to traditional systems, enhancing data linkage quality.

Findings

Jyutping and Pinyin outperform HKG-romanisation in reducing errors

Standardised tonal romanisation improves linkage rates for Chinese names

Using original writing systems is ethically and socially important

Abstract

Data linkage is increasingly used in health research and policy making and is relied on for understanding health inequalities. However, linked data is only as useful as the underlying data quality, and differential linkage rates may induce selection bias in the linked data. A mechanism that selectively compromises data quality is name romanisation. Converting text of a different writing system into Latin based writing, or romanisation, has long been the standard process of representing names in character-based writing systems such as Chinese, Vietnamese, and other languages such as Swahili. Unstandardised romanisation of Chinese characters, due in part to problems of preserving the correct name orders the lack of proper phonetic representation of a tonal language, has resulted in poor linkage rates for Chinese immigrants. This opinion piece aims to suggests that the use of standardised romanisation systems for Cantonese (Jyutping) or Mandarin (Pinyin) Chinese, which incorporate tonal information, could improve linkage rates and accuracy for individuals with Chinese names. We used 771 Chinese and English names scraped from openly available sources, and compared the utility of Jyutping, Pinyin and the Hong Kong Government Romanisation system (HKG-romanisation) for representing Chinese names. We demonstrate that both Jyutping and Pinyin result in fewer errors compared with the HKG-romanisation system. We suggest that collecting and preserving people's names in their original writing systems is ethically and socially pertinent. This may inform development of language-specific pre-processing and linkage paradigms that result in more inclusive research data which better represents the targeted populations.