I'm writing a story right now, about the fictional daughter of a historical pirate queen, most commonly known as Cheng I Sao. Probably the biggest problem I'm having is deciding on the romanisations.

Cheng I Sao is an archaic romanisation of 鄭一嫂, which in Hanyu Pinyin would be written Zheng Yisao. Okay, sounds quite simple. I believe in consistently using pinyin when writing stories with Mandarin names and terms. But the story takes place in Guangdong in the early 1830's, where most people at the time spoke only Cantonese, so Mandarin isn't really appropriate.

Romanisation in Cantonese has a few more problems (at least to me). There are numerous Cantonese romanisation methods, and unlike with Mandarin  there's not one that's considered the standard, at least not yet.

Generally I'll use Yale romanisation, because it tends to look best for my English-language purposes. Jyutping and Cantonese Pinyin are both becoming more popular these days, but tend to look a little stranger in English, and have one or two things I'd rather avoid. So for now Yale seems like the best balance for me. If I was using the romanisation to actually learn Cantonese, however, I might make a different choice.

Despite all this, I tend to use HK government romanisations for surnames. HK Government romanisation is not particularly good, but most people are familiar with its spellings of Cantonese surnames. For stories set in modern-day Hong Kong, it makes sense to do it this way. Using this method, she'd be called Cheng Yat Sou.

But the story I'm writing now takes place in a time before there was such a thing as a HK Government, so I'm thinking of using Yale for the surnames too. Which would make her name Jeng Yat Sou. Her significance will undoubtedly be lost on most people familiar with the historical figure, but I'm not sure that matters to the story.

A bigger problem is that I named the daughter quite a while ago, before really considering all this, and the name I wanted to use only exists under the Jyutping romanisation. It doesn't look particularly nice in Yale. So I can either be a little inconsistent, or I can think of a new name for her.

Unfortunately, I can be quite picky about these things (as a few of you already know), so I'm probably going to have to think of a new name.