Standard transliteration
trevorb
June 30, 2010, 08:29 PM posted in I Have a QuestionOkay so here is something interesting I noticed the other day.
If I put my name into translate.google.com it gives me back a transliterated version of my name. If I feed those charecters back into google then they come out in English as my name..... cool but it set me to wondering if there was a standard way in which transliteration is done?
The transliteration google gave me was
trevor = 特雷弗
my own attempt at this had given me 特热发 or (热发) I am not ginger by the way!
Now is this my English take on the sounds biasing them the wrong way? Does google use a standard way of transliterating of which I am not aware or is there a formula for phonetic use of 汉字
trevorb
Ah so it seems there is some method behind googles transliteration that works better then. I'd not thought of embedded meaning being a barrier to being recognised as a name, but now you say it it seems quite obvious.
That said I do run across Chinese names that I initially translate more literally because I don't recognise them as a name. This begs another question are chinese names picked from a list of names by parents, rather like the process in western countries or is another process used?
changye
Native Chinese speakers can easily tell Chinese person names from Chinese words because they are native speakers. There is no trick.
changye
July 01, 2010, 10:00 AMHi trevorb
When you transliterate foreign words into Chinese, you need to take care so that transliterations don't look like Chinese words. Otherwise, native speakers can't easily tell transliteration words from Chinese words. For example, it's easy for Chinese people to get the meaning of “特雷弗感冒了” (Trevor caught a cold), but not so easy in the case of “特热发感冒了”.