Thread: English names into Chinese.

I was in Chinatown in London, and they have the street signs in English and then underneath its written in Chinese.

But I was wondering, since Chinese uses Kanji and no phonetic alphabet, how do they write things like "Charing Cross Road" and "Leicester Square"? in Chinese?

They take characters which resemble the English syllables as closely as possible in sound. However, in each case they often have a choice between anything from zero to 4+ characters, because firstly there are four tones, and secondly there is often more than one meaning for a particularly phonetic syllable with a particular tone.
So there is art to it, actually, Western companies in China try to find a combination that is relatively close to their original name in sound but has some pleasant and relevant meaning in Chinese. If I actually knew any Chinese I could go into more detail on this
With something like Charing Cross, you have 3 syllables, but this may well end up as four in Chinese, because Chinese syllables always have 'initials' and 'finals', and only a certain set of sounds can be used as finals - almost all of them vowels (there are a few exceptions, such as 'ng'). So you'd have one character representing 'cha', another representing 'ring' (this would be difficult, because the Chinese phoneme represented by 'r' in Pinyin, the romanized script, is an utterly different sound from our 'r'), and (maybe) another representing something close to "cro" and then something with "s-". Maybe.
Basically it's a pretty botched job, the differences are too big for there to be a good way to do this.

I think Charing Cross Road was written with three symbols.

I didn't know they came up with the signs that way. Interesting. Sounds heaps of fun to play with.
Here's an entirely amateurish example of said process. I have no idea whether these Kanji'fied names have grammatical considerations. But, for fun...

cha = tea
ren = man
ke = thirsty
ruci = as such

(charen keruci) The 'i' is a 'eh' sound, not a distinct i like in English.

Charling Cross = Kind-of Thirsty Tea Man

For the record, here are the tones so someone can produce a counter argument, and so Pravit can put them into characters and see IF, by some amazing chance, these were the characters used for the sign.
(Though, the characters never come through on this forum);

cha2
ren2
ke3
ru2ci3

If the characters never come through for you it probably means you haven't installed the fonts, they work fine on mine.

Not sure that's exactly the way they would do it, since they lean more to picking nice-sounding things than to picking things that sound the same, but just for kicks(I'm just using the IME's first pick):

查认可如此

BTW, sometimes they translate the meaning instead of the sound. For example, "Oxford" in Chinese is translated literally as "ox" and "ford."

麦高's pronunciation is close to maccles

田 means field.

街 means street.

西 means west.

敏's pronunciation is close to min

市 means city.

From what I've seen with Chinese, is that they try to use a certain set of characters when representing (at least) countries and also just foreign words in general...

from what i can figure if we use what seems like the "standard" set of characters Charing Cross Road would be:

查尔英*克罗斯*路
(cha er ying * ke luo si * lu)

(路 - lu = road)


as for Leicester Square, I'd think it's something like:

莱克斯特*场

(lai ke si te * chang)
(场 - chang = square)

but, with so many characters to choose from if you want to try for a different meaning you can do that too...but, it does seem like the chinese tend to reuse the same set of characters for representing the same syllables from other languages...usually...

for a lot of names in Chinese characters go here:
http://chineseculture.about.com/library/name/blname.htm