When considering the transliteration of non-Chinese words into Chinese characters, one has to know the following facts:
*Chinese is written with logograms. Therefore, a word of three syllables is transliterated into at least three Chinese characters, in most cases three meaningful verbal units.
*The same foreign word can have many different transliterations, based on different dialects. Transliteration based on one particular dialect may not sound close to the original when pronounced with another dialect. The official pinyin, based on , is used in this article.
*Even within the same dialect, there may be more than one transliteration for a word, as homophones abound in Chinese, when are disregarded. There are plenty of characters to choose from when transliterating a word. In other words, one can manipulate the transliteration to suit one's purpose.
Sound, meaning and graph
A transliteration into Chinese characters is sometimes intended to reflect the meaning as well as the sound of the transliterated word. For example, the common ending —ва in a female name is usually transliterated as 娃 , and the —в in a male name as 夫 ; Utopia is famously transliterated by Yan Fu as 烏托邦 ; the name of the group Pantagruel is transliterated as 龐大固埃 , as 龐大 means "gigantic" and 固 "solid". One of the Chinese translations of World wide web is 萬維網 , meaning "10,000-dimensional net ".
Sometimes subjective feelings towards a thing is reflected in its transliteration. The Beatles is known in Taiwan and Hong Kong as 披頭四 , comparing the four-character idiom 披頭散髮 . Esperanto was known as 愛斯不難讀 when it was first introduced into China.
Fidelity to the sound of the original is often sacrificed in a non-technical context. In transliterating the names of people, companies, shops and brands, phonetic fidelity is not the overriding factor: anything goes, as long as the Chinese name is memorable, dignified or auspicious. In some cases the naming process can hardly be termed "transliteration". A common example is the Chinese names non-Chinese people adopt for themselves, which are not truly transliterated, but rather "adapted" from or "inspired" by the original. See, for instance, the .
Sometimes characters are specially made for transliterated terms. For example, 茉莉 for jasmine , 袈裟 for or most of the Chinese characters for chemical elements. Most of them are semantic-phonetic compounds.
Connotations
Given that a word may be transliterated in accordance with meaning as well as sound, an "innocent" transliteration may be unwittingly interpreted as reflecting the meaning of the original. During the Qing Dynasty, some Chinese scholars were unhappy to find that China was located on a continent called 亞細亞 , i.e. Asia, as 亞 means "secondary" and 細 "small", believing that the Europeans were deliberately belittling the East by such a naming. It was not only the Chinese who were unhappy. The ancient Japanese, or the people were upset by their name being represented by the character by the Chinese, and substituted it with another character.. The modern African also accused the Chinese of racism, as Africa is written as in Chinese. Whether these accusations were justified remains a matter of controversy.
Owing to cultural difference and personal preference, whether a Chinese character has a negative meaning, and is thus inappropriate to be used for transliteration, can often be a subjective matter. The following phrases contain characters usually not used in today’s transliterations:
*Mozambique as 莫三鼻給 , with 鼻 meaning "nose" and 三鼻 "three noses". Today the country is more often transliterated as 莫桑比克 .
*Aberdeen, a common name for places and people, as 鴨巴甸 , with 鴨 meaning duck. A place in Hong Kong having the same name, Aberdeen Harbour, was originally called 香港仔 , meaning "Hong Kong minor". It is now the official name of that place, but 鴨巴甸 is still used in a colloquial way.
*A street in Macau is called ''Avenida do Conselheiro Ferreira de Almeida'', named after the official Ferreira de Almeida. Ferreira was transliterated as 肥利喇 , as shown on the name of the street, with 肥 meaning "fat" .
On the other hand, the following transliterations are meant to, or happen to, have positive connotations:
* is abbreviated as 美國 from 亞美利堅合眾國, meaning "beautiful country"
*Athens as 雅典 , literally "elegant" and "classical";
*Champs-?lysées as 香榭麗舍 , meaning "fragrant pavilion beautiful house";
*Coca-cola as 可口可樂 , 可口 meaning "delicious" and 可樂 "pleasing, satisfactory";
* as 翡冷翠 , 翡翠 meaning "jadeite" and 冷 "cold". Note that today the city is usually known as 佛羅倫斯 , a transliteration based on the English Florence, or the Latin ''Florentia'';
*Fontainebleau as 楓丹白露 , meaning "red maple white dew";
*Ithaca as 綺色佳, literally "gorgeous color wonderful";
*Revlon as 露華濃, literally as "revealing bright spring dew", excerpted from Li Bai's ''A Song of Pure Happiness'' , meaning "elegant mountain beautiful land".
*Munich, German: München, the capital of Bavaria/Germany as 慕尼黑 Mùníhēi meaning "esteem - nun - black", accidentally referring to the "Münchner Kindl", the city coat of arms of Munich showing kind of child-like monk dressed in black.
History
Transliteration appeared early in ancient Chinese texts as the Han people interacted with foreign peoples, such as Xiongnu. Besides proper names, a small number of loanwords in their transliterated forms found their way into Chinese during the Han Dynasty after Zhang Qian's exploration of the Western Regions.
Transliterations of the ' languages can also be found in ancient texts. A complete transliterated text of a song can be found in 's ''Shuoyuan'' of the Western Han Dynasty. The Chinese version of the song, known as ''Yueren Ge'' , was also provided in the work. Some scholars have tried to reconstruct the original text.
The classics of Buddhism began to be translated into Chinese during the late Han Dynasty. Many of the Sanskrit terms were then transliterated and became part of the Chinese language. According to the Song Dynasty scholar Zhou Dunyi , the famous monk and translator Xuanzang had his ''Wuzhong Bu Fan'' , suggesting that Sanskrit terms should be transliterated instead of being translated when they are:
*arcane, such as incantations
*
*not found in China
*traditionally transliterated, not translated
*lofty and subtle, which a translation might devalue and obscure
These ancient transliteration into Chinese characters provide clues to the reconstruction of Middle Chinese. In historical Chinese phonology, this kind of information is called ''duiyin'' , with Baron Alexander von Sta?l-Holstein being the first scholar to emphasize its importance in reconstructing ancient Chinese. The transliterations made during the Tang Dynasty are particularly valuable as linguistic data, as the Tantra sect was then popular, with the mantras, an important Tantra practice, rendered very carefully into Chinese characters by the monk-translators. The spells, it was believed, would lose their power when their sounds were not accurately uttered.
During the late 19th century, when Western ideas and products flooded into China, transliterations mushroomed. They include not only transliterations of proper nouns, but also those of common nouns, i.e. ''phonemic loans''. Most of them proved fads, though. After that period of time, people tend to favor s.
In modern , foreign terms are transliterated into katakana. Some terms still appear in kanji, though, an example being 俱楽部 . Some of these were absorbed into Chinese during the late 19th and early 20th century. For more about the use of Chinese characters to represent Japanese native words and foreign words, see ''ateji''.
Official Guide
In People's Republic of China, the current official guide for the transliteration of people's names is the ''Names of the world's peoples: a comprehensive dictionary of names in Roman-Chinese'' , compiled by the Proper Names and Translation Service, the Xinhua News Agency. See the for a number of languages provided by the work. Most of the official transliterations are based on Mandarin, the official language. A few of the official transliterations are not based on Mandarin, as they had been absorbed into Chinese long before Mandarin was established as the official language.
Cantonese media use a different transliteration system based on Cantonese.
In Singapore, the Translation Standardisation Committee for the Chinese Media is responsible for the transliteration standard.
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