Word-for-word center-aligning of parellel lines of text in LaTeX?

Question

I'd like to prepare a LaTeX document using a common format of displaying both Chinese characters and the corresponding romanization (pinyin) above each word. For an example, please refer to this page from a book.

Note that, in the example picture, the romanized text above is centered between the characters below. So, as in on the first line, it says "走读生" (one word, but 3 characters) and the corresponding pinyin text "\zou3\du2\sheng3" is centered above those 3 characters.

Answer 1

What about stackrel in mathmode? $\stackrel{<chinese>}{<pinyin>}$

Answer 2

The package covington provides an easy way to gloss text. For example:

\gll Dit is een voorbeeldje in het Nederlands.
     This is a {little example} in {} Dutch.
\glend

The two sentences would be aligned word by word. You can align a group of words in one sentence with a single word in the other (cf. "voorbeeldje" and "little example"), or leave an empty space below/above a word (cf. "het").

See Covington documentation