terms which are not included. The English table is reproduced below; those for a number of other languages are available on the Chinese Wikipedia. The Basic Laws of the Hong Kong (article) and Macau (article) Special Administrative Regions provide that "Chinese" will be the official languages of those territories, in addition to English and Portuguese, respectively, leaving ambiguous the relative preference for Cantonese and Mandarin. In practice, transcriptions based on both Cantonese and Mandarin pronunciations have been used. In Singapore, transcription standards are established by the Translation Standardisation Committee for the Chinese Media and in 2014 was moved to National Translation Committee (NTC) of the Ministry of Communication and Information. In Malaysia, transcription/translation standards are established by Chinese Language Standardisation Council of Malaysia. Increasingly, other countries are setting their own official standards for Chinese transcription and do not necessarily follow Xinhua's versions, just as Xinhua's version differs from Wade–Giles and other international standards. For example, the United States embassy in China recommends rendering "Obama" as Ōubāmǎ, while Xinhua uses Àobāmǎ. History Transcription of foreign terms may date to the earliest surviving written records in China, the Shang oracle bones. As the Huaxia spread from their initial settlements near the confluence of the Wei and Yellow rivers, they were surrounded on all sides by other peoples. The Chinese characters developed to describe them may have originally transcribed local names, such as the proposed connection between the original "Eastern Yi" people () and an Austroasiatic word for "sea". However, the tendency within China was to fit new groups into the existing structure, so that, for example, "Yi" eventually became a word for any "barbarian" and the name "Yue" ( & ), originally applied to a people northwest of the Shang, was later applied to a people south of the Yangtze and then to many cultures as far south as Vietnam. Interaction with the states of Chu, Wu, and Yue during the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods of the later Zhou brings the first certain evidence of transcription: most famously, the word jiāng (), originally krong, derives from the Austroasiatic word for "river". Besides proper names, a small number of loanwords also found their way into Chinese during the Han dynasty after Zhang Qian's exploration of the Western Regions. The Western Han also saw Liu Xiang's transcription and translation of the "Song of the Yue Boatman" in his Garden of Stories.