It was a big kerfuffle for a while, then it died down quickly. Ten years later we looked at those original mini skirts and laughed at how long they were, almost down to the knee! Forty years later we can’t remember who designed it though some of us might remember their futile claims of ownership. Anyway, it was originally intended to be something like a brand name, but that was defeated immediately while massive adoption made it unenforceable. I have no idea whether that’s related to its Chinese name.

I’ll give you a good example of the exact opposite: car names are almost universally marketed and referred to in Taiwan under the original English name. Ford Focus is called 福特 Focus in Taiwan. Why? Because Ford has decided to use the original English name as the trademark in Taiwan. Meanwhile, the same car is called 福特福克斯 because trademark protection laws are different in China and Ford didn’t want someone else using a Chinese name that sounds similar to Focus. The point I’m trying to make is that transliteration to Chinese has a lot more to do with commercial concern rather than actual language useage.

A second, unrelated problem in transliteration is that Chinese has a definite consonant-vowel order and does not support consonant clusters. There are only three consonants in which a Chinese syllable can end - n, ng or r (儿, that is). This means that English words like “scream” present a problem in transliteration, as, to retain all its consonants (which mark a word more distinctively than its vowels), it would need at least four syllables in Chinese, which bloats the Chinese transliteration four times as compared to the English word. So, in a lot of places, transliteration is forced by this constraint. This is why the ‘r’ in ‘martini’ is ignored to maintain brevity and the Chinese word for ‘golf’ “gāo’ěrfū” (高尔夫) has three syllables instead of one as a punishment for being more phonetically accurate in its depiction of the original word and not ignoring that ‘l’.

Chinese: Interesting example. My point with the above examples is that the English is included in the signs describing the products. In the book cover above it says “Harry Potter” in English, and the signs for Coca-cola and McDonalds also describe the product. While I would expect that they would use their Chinese equivalents when talking about it, I didn’t think they wouldn’t recognize the English name at all, despite constantly being exposed to it.

Top Cat: Here are my answers to your questions.

1. I would think that as in the examples shown here, the meaning would have priority over the sounds since ultimately it’s the Chinese who will be using the names, so it would be more important for it to have a good sounding meaning than its relation to the English original.

2. Chinese in general is a lot more context sensitive than English. There is a great more ambiguity with many words and sentences having multiple meanings depending on context. So while learners like ourselves struggle with recognizing which words are names and which aren’t, I’m sure it would come a lot more natural to native Chinese speakers (although I’m sure they have their share of jokes involving puns or mistaken translations).

3. Like you said, place names are more readily identifiable in English due to the use of capitalization so I would expect this to be more of a problem for English speakers learning Chinese than the other way around. Having said that, there are other aspects of names that cause confusion on both sides, so I think I’ll expand upon this topic in my next post!

Jan: The word I have for martini is 馬丁尼 (Mǎdīngní) (but I like your version better!). As there would be multiple ways to transliterate an English word, at some point one will be picked as the most used, but until then I’m sure different versions end up floating around.

You would think that Harry Potter’s name would be pronounced as hārìpòtè as rì is closer to ‘rry’ sound in ‘Harry’ than lì and pò is closer to the ‘Po’ sound in ‘Potter’ than bò.

I have some questions about names in Chinese.

1. Do the Chinese often sacrifice the sounds that are closer to the English equivalent so they can give proper meaning to words?

2. How do the Chinese know when characters represent a name of a person or a place and not a strange word that they may not have seen before?

This may sound like a stupid question, but I have often looked at Chinese script and tried to work out what a word means only to find out later that it is actually a person’s name or a place name. In English it is obvious to us which words represent people and place names and which words don’t as we capitalise the first letter of each word in the name. Of course when we look at Chinese characters we don’t get this information.

3. Do Chinese people have the same problem identifying names in English as we do with identifying names in Chinese?