How we pluralise Chinese terms
Wuxia Blog|Translation notes

How we pluralise Chinese terms

Jenxi Seow
6 mins read
Contents

We keep a lot of Chinese words in our translations. Jianghu, neili, shifu, jin, xia. The broader reasoning is set out in How we translate wuxia. This article is about a smaller question that turned out to be more interesting than expected.

Updated 7 November 2026: we later replaced the word-by-word approach described below with a test that looks at the slot a word fills in the English sentence. Counted nouns, people included, now take the English -s, and so do the group names built from them. The sections on people, relational terms and names below give the current rule.

Is it three jin, or three jins?

We had both. Our own corpus said li, liang, shichen, mu, wen, chi, cun and qian never took an -s, while jin and zhang occasionally did. That is not a standard, it is an accident. So we went looking for the actual rule.

The rule is not “foreign words don’t pluralise”

The tempting answer is that borrowed words keep their foreignness and therefore resist English endings. That is wrong, and English disproves it constantly. Kimonos. Tsunamis. Futons. Typhoons. Gurus. Tycoons. Every one of those is a borrowing that took an English plural without fuss.

The better generalisation is that a loanword acquires English plural morphology at the point it stops being felt as foreign. Plural marking is a symptom of naturalisation, not a stylistic preference. Which means the question is never “is this word foreign?” but “has this word been absorbed?” — and the answer varies by word, by register, and over time.

What Japanese and Korean borrowings show

English has been absorbing Japanese and Korean vocabulary for longer and more thoroughly than Chinese, which makes them a useful control.

Start with money and measures, because they are the cleanest case. Yen. Won. Nobody writes ten thousand wons. The pattern holds for units that are less familiar too: tatami is a unit of floor area as much as a mat, and a room is a six-tatami room, never six-tatamis. Tsubo, pyeong — the same. Measures resist the plural more stubbornly than any other class of borrowing.

Social roles are where it gets instructive, because the same word goes both ways depending on where it is used. In literary and historical writing, these stay invariant: the forty-seven samurai, the daimyō of the western provinces, the yangban of the late Joseon. Cross into general or commercial English and the identical class of word takes the -s without complaint: shoguns, ninjas, chaebols. Nothing about the words changed. The register did.

Relational terms are the most consistent of the three. Senpai, kōhai, sensei, sunbae, hoobae. It is hard to find careful English that pluralises any of them. Two things seem to be going on: they describe a position relative to whoever is speaking rather than naming a free-standing category, and they are used to address people, where number never comes up.

What that gives us

Measures stay invariant. Three jin, ten li, five liang, two shichen. Every comparable borrowing agrees, and there is a detail specific to Chinese that settles it. The Chinese measures that do pluralise in English are catty and catties, tael and taels, picul and piculs — which are precisely the words we have rejected, because they reached English through the Malay of the maritime trade rather than from Chinese, and belong to the vocabulary of the customs house rather than the story. Those words take English plurals because they were naturalised into the English of the treaty ports. Adopting their grammar while rejecting their vocabulary would be half a decision.

Counted nouns take the -s, people included. Two jians, four shifus, his two shixiongs, the xias gathered at the inn. We first held xia and the relational terms invariant, on the model of samurai and senpai, and that did not survive contact with the text. A reader of these translations meets jian as the word for the thing, not as a foreign term on loan, and his two shixiong reads as an error no English writer would make with elder brother. So the rule now turns on the slot, not the word. A title bound to a name, or a word used to address someone, stays bare: Xu shifu, “Shixiong, look.” So does a mass noun: qi, neili, jianghu. Anything counted takes the -s.

Peoples take the -s. The Mongols, the Manchus, the Jurchens. This is ordinary English and there was never a question.

The trap, and the case we argued about

Dynasties are not peoples. English does not pluralise dynastic names: the Ming, under the Qing, the Song fell. Not the Mings. We found seventy-three instances of “the Jins” in one translation, referring to the Jurchen state, and nearly swept them into the singular on the assumption they were the unit of weight misbehaving. They were not. They were a different error entirely — and a mechanical fix would have flattened a twenty-year war into a measure of grain. Anyone running a sweep over plural forms should carve out ethnonyms first.

Names follow the plural. We write Seven Xias of Wudang for 武当七侠 and Four Xias of Taiyue for 太岳四侠. English builds names like these on a plural: the Three Musketeers, the Seven Sages, the Twelve Apostles. Once the common noun takes the -s, the name built from it does too. The wording of an epithet is fixed once it is set; its grammar is not exempt.

This is the one we argued about longest. Our first answer went the other way, on the model of the Forty-Seven Ronin, and the slugs from that time still read seven-xia-of-wudang and four-xia-of-taiyue. We have left them alone: a slug is an address, not a display name, and changing it would break links for no reader’s benefit. What settled the question was consistency. Group epithets turn up in headings, article titles and the first line of character entries, so a name that broke the rule the rest of the prose follows would be the most visible break of all.

Why bother

None of this is visible to a reader who is enjoying the story, which is the point. The reason to settle it is that inconsistency is visible — three jin on one page and three jins on the next is the kind of small wrongness that makes a translation feel unattended, even when the reader cannot say what is bothering them.

The larger reason is that the grammar should follow the same logic as the vocabulary. We keep these words because we want the reader standing inside the world rather than outside looking in. Bolting an English ending onto them pulls in the opposite direction, quietly, one letter at a time.

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