Knot in Korean (romanized), maedup or maedeup. Po-tae-toe po-tah-toe or more accurately Beijing vs Peking. I first saw it as maedup and still see it as that from time to time, it's shorter, I like short. Brevity is good. When I'm copying something down and it's written as maedeup, I'll copy it that way though. So, no consistency. Sorry.

But, knot in Korean (Hangeul) is 매듭. No confusion there.

Traditional knot: 전통매듭 jeon-tong-mae-deup

In the translation grid below, I'm leaving the "maedeup" off of the Korean romanization (MCT), "knot" or "매듭" off of names from time to time to keep the table as compact as I can without excessive ambiguity. Consider them implied if they're not there. 8) Also, if the romanization has dashes in it, I probably got it from an online conversion tool, if it doesn't, then I got it from one of my books.

The easiest way for me to enter Chinese text is by typing English text and getting something to translate it for me. Generally speaking this does 60% of the job. Then there are the characters that are more difficult to translate, so I need to enter them directly. For this task I like to write the characters into a system that does Chinese handwriting recognition. For this job I used the free iTranslate iPhone app and the nciku dictionary. I used the iTranslate app, mostly because I was out, but it had the added advantage of quickly swapping the Chinese and English back and forth from the translate/translated windows for refinement of the desired characters. Also, unlike the other translation apps on my phone, iTranslate allowed me to get the data out (via email in this case). Apparently iTranslate is "powered by Google" and indeed once I got home I also used Google Translate with largely the same results although there is no handwriting recognition involved there.

I had just finished going through a big stack of videos that I had found on youku, a youTube-like site in China (search for Chinese knotting:中国结 and knotting art:结艺) when my knot (매듭 in Korean) search brought me a practical knot result. That's ok. I've got nothing against practical things and it's not like that automated search turns up many results in general, but it got me to thinking, how to refine this search to produce a more focused decorative result? Taking another look at Kim Hee-Jin's maedup site and Korean Traditional Knots and started parsing down this string "한국의 전통매듭" which as a string translates to "Korea's traditional knot". Previously, I had determined that "매듭" means "knot" so that left the "전통" part. Traditional, eh?

"한국의" translates as "South Korea" and "국의" translates as "country". I should not have been surprised that none of the individual parts translated as "south" which is apparently "남쪽". 8)

I've discovered the youTube channel of a 60 year old person (int301) in Taiwan which consists entirely of Chinese knotting instructions. The videos are silent, so the only language issue is the titles of the videos themselves. That's where I can help a bit. 8) The following translations are not formal with canonical knot names, they're just off the cuff notes I took for myself when I was looking at the videos

Looking at the full title of a video, the first one looks like this:
五福結 影片 中國結一線生機 提供

This part is duplicated, more or less in the title of almost all of the videos: 中國結一線生機 提供

Chinese Knot: 中國結
This part, I believe, means "video" more or less. Perhaps "instructional video", but I have put no effort into an actual translation: 一線生機 提供

五福結 interlocked double coin medallion
雙錢結 double coin
五股六花 circular mat (five:五, unit/ply/portion/section:股, six:六, flower:花)

Feeling unequal to the task of dealing with my massive backlog of links that I need to post at the time, I decided to fiddle with the blog itself. I put in a blogroll on the side, and a Google gadget to translate the page for people who would like a translation (I didn't read the source code before I included it, bad, Carol!, I wonder if the readers need enough English to read the "Google Translate" part... 8). I'm going to try it to see if it will translate all the non-English bits that are in this post into English. 8)

In any case, I was noticing that after the first few, the postings some of the blogs (while the content might be nice) were posted to very infrequently, at least of late (I should talk, eh?).

But, these topics, I would hope, are ones that could be covered in China/Taiwan, Korea, and Japan with probably greater skill, enthusiasm and local appreciation (not to mention other fun places like Singapore and the like).

My current automated searches were not turning up things that are not written in English, so could I, could I....?

How to
An Instructable for how to condition and dye hemp rope. Better (?) they list a rope source that I had not heard of before. It's interesting that there's a disclaimer at the beginning about using your rope safely, but nothing in the dyeing part that once you use your nice big pot for dyeing your rope, you should never use it for food again.
http://www.instructables.com/id/Condition_and_Dye_Your_Own_Hemp_Rope/
(via)

Frayed Knot has an index of how to/tutorials to which a variety of knot tyers have contributed.
http://www.frayedknotarts.com/tutor1.html

Events
On March 29, 2009 at a blood drive in Malasia at the Tzu Chi Miri Liaison office, they are also doing a number of craft activities and demos including teaching Chinese knots.

小耳翼疊壓吉祥結B型
little ear wing fold pressure lucky/auspicious knot B type/build/model

Happy moo year! It's the year of the Earth Ox (a couple of years ago, we had to explain to our Chinese teacher why it was not the year of the "cow" or for that matter "sheep" (vs "goat"), "bunny" (vs "rabbit" or "hare"), "mouse" (vs "rat"), or "chicken" (vs "rooster"). 8)

I have this vague recollection that Lydia Chen hadn't really named the variants in her Chinese Knotting 3 book, they were more like "variant A" and "variant B". Whether numbered or named with poetry, I just wanted to see what she was naming things and check if it was different in the English version, but where was my book? Not on the shelf where it's supposed to be with one and two. Not in the bedroom where I might have piled it upon unpacking from the last trip. Not in the living room, not here, not there, still not here, etc. I must have wasted most of a day looking without success. So I take the Chinese version which is right where it belongs and look at the characters.