Originally Posted by
chornedsnorkack
For example, the new station of Zhangye. It can be rendered as Zhangyexi, or Zhangye West. I called Zhangyexi "transcribed". Zhangye West I called "translation".
Apart from dong, nan, xi, bei (which I assume are common knowledge for most if not all here), can you think of any other components of train station names in which transliteration isn't 100% accurate?
Eta: when 东南西北 are integral components of place names, they get transliterated as a matter of practice. Examples: 北京,南京,西安,广西,河北,浦东 .
But, when employed in the use of train station names, their context is obvious as long as you know the city names. What's more, the directional character that represents the placement of the train station is universally appeneded to end of the word. E.g. the second 南 in 南京南 tells us that that the station is on the south side of Nanjing.