I am working on an essay for school and I was looking at a wood-block print
called, " 我艦隊於黄海清艦撃沈之圖 " by Kobayashi Kiyochika.

According to websites, in romaji this is, "Waga kantai Kôkai ni oite Shikan o
uchi shizumeru no zu"

However when I was looking at each kanji it turned out more like: "Waga kantai
oite kōkai shinkan gekichin no zu" ”わが かんたい おいて こうかい しんかん げきちん の ず”

Is the website wrong or am I?

And If I am wrong, could you explain what I did that was wrong.
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translation spelling kanbun
我艦隊於黄海清艦撃沈之圖 how do you say this in Japanese?
我艦隊於黄海清艦撃沈之圖 seems to be in
[kanbun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanbun)-style, i.e., it's written
following the Chinese grammar. The grammar of kanbun is closer to that of
English because Chinese is an SVO (subject-verb-object) language. You cannot
read it as a meaningful Japanese sentence without changing the reading order.

"In Yellow Sea" is 於黄海 in kanbun (於 = "in/at"), but it has to be 黄海に於いて when
"read as a meaningful Japanese ( **kundoku** )". 於いて黄海 is simply ungrammatical
as a Japanese phrase. Please read the example in the Wikipedia article to
catch what is happening here.
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answer
If you look at [the real scale image of
我艦隊於黄海清艦撃沈之圖](https://dl.ndl.go.jp/info:ndljp/pid/1312111/1), you can see a
few small okurigana attached to kanji.

[![enter image description
here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/gcUOf.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/gcUOf.png)

Although it does not conform today's standard orthography, it makes the name
unambiguously read as 我【わ】が艦隊【かんたい】黄海【こうかい】 **に** 於【おい】て清艦【しんかん】 **を** 撃【う】
**ち** 沈【しず】(め/む) **る** 之【の】圖【ず】, which basically agrees with that romaji
(except it's _shi **n** kan_, which seems to be a typo).

於 is a Chinese preposition "to/at", and through the kanbun kundoku tradition,
it is normally translated as ～において with reversed order. When Chinese was
regarded as the prestigious writing language, such orthographical convention
was usually employed even when writing Japanese.

But only a handful of kanji are commonly written reversed as shorthands today,
such as:

  * 於○○: ○○において "at ○○"
  * 自○○: ○○より "from ○○"
  * 至○○: ○○まで／にいたる "to (=until) ○○"
  * 含○○: ○○をふくむ "including ○○"
  * 除○○: ○○をのぞく "excluding ○○"

A convenient example on Google: [![enter image description
here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/l6gC7.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/l6gC7.jpg)
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answer