Translate FAO Country, Species or Fishing Area Names

This function translates English names, as used in the FAO data, to Chinese or to bilingual "Chinese English" names. Translations come from the FAO official code lists (country, species and water area lists published with the FAO data, and the ASFIS species list). Names without an official Chinese name are filled from the tables bundled with the package, and otherwise kept in English.

Usage

fao_translate(x, type = c("country", "species", "area"), lang = "zh")

Arguments

x

A character vector of English names.

type

The kind of name: "country", "species" or "area".

lang

The output language: "en" (English), "zh" (Chinese) or "both" (Chinese and English).

Value

A character vector of translated names.

Details

Many FAO species items have no Chinese name in the FAO lists. For those identified to one species, the Chinese common name of the species in FishBase or SeaLifeBase is used (Froese and Pauly 2026; Palomares and Pauly 2026): the name given for China in Mandarin Chinese, in simplified characters, preferring the name FishBase marks as preferred and leaving out names applied to synonyms and species with several equally used names. The table, with the other names and the source of each, is inst/extdata/species_names_zh_fishbase.csv, made by data-raw/build_species_names_zh.R. FAO names always come first.

References

Froese, R. and Pauly, D. (Eds.) (2026). FishBase. World Wide Web electronic publication, version 06/2026. https://www.fishbase.se

Palomares, M.L.D. and Pauly, D. (Eds.) (2026). SeaLifeBase. World Wide Web electronic publication, version 06/2026. https://www.sealifebase.se

See also

Other settings and language: fao_font(), fao_settings()

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
fao_translate(c("Morocco", "Spain"), "country", "both")
} # }