Hyphenated Given Names in Romanization

Basically Taiwan and China use separate systems to transcribe or to Romanize. We use Wade-Giles (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wade-Giles) and they use Pinyin. See the difference already? There's a hyphen in our system to distinguish the boundaries from character to character. It is somewhat like how Americans separate syllables in a word. In Mandarin-Chinese each character represents a syllable, and we use hyphens to tell apart, while in Pinyin, you need to look for consonant clusters to find out the character/word boundaries. Hyphenated names are the result of systematic differences in Romanization. http://www.loc.gov/catdir/pinyin/difference.html

There is yet another difference in hyphenated names. Some capitalize the second character/word while others don't. I would say the uncapitalizing the second word is more appropriate. Given names should be looked at as a whole. Uncapitalized hyphenated names, the word following the hyphen in particular, shows the idea of it. Also, medias like CNN and BBC use uncapitalized second word when their coverage talks about people in Taiwan. For example, they would write a name as 'Ting-fen Lin' instead of 'Ting-Fen Lin.'

However, as far as hypenated names go, it seems that Uncle Same has already taken care of the confusion for Americans because "the Library of Congress is moving to adopt the pinyin system of Romanization of Chinese." http://www.loc.gov/catdir/pinyin/romcover.html