Chinese romanizations: Wade-Giles to Pinyin conversions Chinese romanizations: Wade-Giles to Pinyin conversionssystem of romanizing the modern Chinese written language, originally devised to simplify Chinese-language characters for the Western world. Initiated by Sir Thomas Francis Wade (Wade, Sir Thomas Francis), the system was modified by the University of Cambridge professor Herbert Allen Giles (Giles, H.A.) in his Chinese-English Dictionary (1912). With Giles's syllabic changes, Wade-Giles became the preferred Chinese transliteration system among both academics and nonspecialists in English-speaking countries and was interpreted into Danish, Finnish, German, Italian, Norwegian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish. The Chinese themselves experimented with several systems to transcribe local expressions for non-Chinese publications, but in mainland China these were all replaced officially in 1979 by the clearer Pinyin romanization system. Wade-Giles continued to be used on the island of Taiwan, although a modified system that was orthographically somewhat between Pinyin and Wade-Giles has been in limited use there since about 2000.