No.
The deposit is named for Fuwan village and Changkeng hamlet, between which it is located. The Chinese name of Fuwan village is "富湾镇", which transliterates to "Fuwanzhen" (zhen = village). More specifically, "富" transliterates to "fu" and "湾" transliterates to "wan". The syllable "wang" corresponds to entirely different characters.
This is a prime example of what I refer to as "n-ng dyslectics": Almost every syllable that ends on "-n" has an analogue that ends on "-ng" (e.g. Chen-Cheng, Wan-Wang, Guan-Guang, Fen-Feng, etc.) and the seemigly similar analogues are confused endlessly, both in the western literature and by Chinese authors translating their papers. The "z-zh-dyslectics" (Zhi-Zi, Zhang-Zang, etc.) belong to the same category. The only way to find out the correct spelling is to locate the proper Chinese name and transliterate it yourself (there are conversion tables available on a number of websites).
Of course, it's only a transliteration (i.e. a conversion of Chinese characters in a phonetic equivalent that is written in the latin alphabet) and not a translation. In order to translate from Chinese, you can't use the transliteration, because each phonetic syllable corresponds to a large number of characters, so you need the original text to make a translation. One might argue therefore, that such errors do not really matter. However, one easily overlooks that these errors can make it impossible, or at least very difficult to keep track of the localities in the literature or in a database. What, if you miss the most important papers in a search just because some idiot inadvertently left out a "g" when he entered the data and did not take the time to double-check his entries ? In fact, this has already turned into a very serious problem, and to really locate all papers that may be relevant to a locality, one has to play around with all possible permutations ...
As an example, if there's a dealer at the next Tucson show who offers specimen from, say, a "Fenguangwang Mine", you have to perform literature searches for the following keywords (or, if you just want to find it on mindat, search for the following localities) to be sure not to miss it (or, to be sure that it is not already in the database):
- Fenguanwan,
- Fenguanwang,
- Fenguangwan,
- Fenguangwang,
- Fengguanwan,
- Fengguanwang,
- Fengguangwan,
- Fengguangwang
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/18/2012 10:44PM by Peter Haas.
Mineral and Locality Search
