What do you call a Chinese astronaut?
We always call a police officer, teacher or metal worker the same in Dutch, regardless of the country in which he or she works. In aerospace it is different. That’s what we call Russian astronauts cosmonauts, even though they basically have the same profession as their western colleagues.
Chinese call their astronauts themselves yuhangyuan, but that term is rarely used internationally. The term also comes taikonauten before, but then again especially outside China. That term was coined by a Malaysian, know Wikipedia, and was acquired by the administrator of a Chinese space travel website.
Taikonaut is derived from the Chinese word for space, taikong. The syllable -naut has not been translated, otherwise you would taikongren of taikongyuan Hatch. And according to Wikipedia that means ‘alien being’, which of course is not the intention.
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