Transliteration

I've always enjoyed hearing names that have been transliterated into Chinese. Generally, when trying to render an English name into Chinese, one Chinese character is assigned to each syllable in English trying to match the pronunciation as closely as possible. The result is a "Chinese-ified" sounding name which may or may not sound close enough to the English name to be recognizable, but is always Chinese enough to make you smile. This applies to names of famous people, brand names, geographical locations, foreign restaurant chains, Biblical words, and even the word Olympics among other things.

For example, one of my favorites is Arnold Schwarzenegger's name pronounced in Chinese:

阿诺德 施瓦辛格 Ānuòdé Shīwǎxīngé (ah-nuwah-duh-sh-wah-shing-guh)


Friday night I went to a piano recital on campus. Before the concert started, I flipped through the program which was all written in Chinese. As I glanced down the list of compositions that the students had selected to play, I started trying to sound out the names of the composers they were written by. I recognized probably 75% of the Chinese characters and it made for a fun game to try to see if I could get enough syllables to make a "Chinese-ified" name that I could then try to translate back into an English name.

Here are the composers' names in Chinese with the pinyin and my attempt at a phonetic transcription (which isn't meant to be accurate according to any dictionary or adhere to IPA).

The first composer I guessed was this one:

拉赫玛尼诺夫 lā hè mǎ ní nuò fū (lah-huh-mah-nee-nuwah-fooh) = Rachmaninoff

Then I figured these out:

肖邦 xiāo bāng (shee-ow bahng)

舒伯特 shū bó tè (shoo buah tuh)

贝多芬 bèi duō fēn (bay duah fen)

李斯特 lǐ sī tè (lee suh tuh)

门德尔松 mén dé ěr sōng (men duh ar sung)

So, if your "chinese-ified" decoding skills still need some development (or if you slept through Music Appreciation class in high school) here are the composers' names in English.

Chopin
Schubert
Beethoven
Listz
Mendelssohn

While I do have the necessary skills to figure out these names in Chinese, I have just discovered that I do not have the skills to spell these names in English. I had to look all of them up except Chopin.

I've had quite a few funny run-ins with transliterated names over the years. Once when I was in Beijing I tried to make up my own "Chinese-fied" rendering of the name for Schlotzsky's Deli. I completely made it up, but when I finally did find the Schlotzsky's and asked them how to say their name in Chinese, it was almost exactly what I had been saying.

I think my favorite transliteration story actually happened to Katie. The first year we taught in Yichang, Katie was teaching 7th grade students who had just begun to learn English. Katie also had just begun to learn Chinese. One day in class her students were trying to ask her about something that they didn't know how to say in English. They kept saying, "Bu shi. Bu shi. USA. We-aye-pea." Katie was baffled, as were the rest of us who had just arrived in China. We had just learned that in Chinese "bu" means "no" and "shi" is the verb "to be." Why were the students saying "am not" over and over? What did that have to do with the USA? Katie just had to tell the students she had no idea what they were talking about. Finally, after Katie told the rest of us about it, our friend Carma had a breakthrough. They weren't saying "bu shi" they were saying "Bu Shi" as in "Bush." George Bush. And "we-aye-pee" was "V.I.P."--the only way they knew to get across the idea of an important person since they didn't know the English word for "president". We laughed at the idea that Katie had told her students she didn't even know her own country's president.