Help please with a translation

[Guest therealj]

Hi my daughter has a great interest in chinese culture and I was wanting to get her a painting of her name in Chinese for her upcoming birthday, can someone please tell me if this is an accurate translation, and if not maybe point me in the right direction. Her name is Alexis

thank you

Jason

[Guest Calvin_Sheng]

I think 艾丽克西丝 is better.

艾(A)丽(le)克西(xi)丝(s)

[Guest therealj]

I can't read what you wrote . Do I have to install something to read Chinese fonts?

[skylee]

The transliteration you have is written in simplified Chinese. I would think that it would look better in traditional Chinese. The same characters written in traditional Chinese are like this (I am not sure if you can read them) -

艾麗西絲

The four characters mean 1) young/pretty 2) beautiful 3) west 4) silk.

[Quest]

Roddy, this is where an attachments mod (limit upload size to maybe 50k and jpg/gif only) would come in handy

is 西絲 better than 西施？

it's "xishi" but still, 西施 is too pretty a name to ignore.

[Guest jackychow]

hi therealj, this web site uses Unicode, you can see both simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese if your web browser support Unicode encoding.

The followng page teachs you how to change encoding in some web browsers.

http://xuquang.com/help-utf.html

[Guest therealj]

thank you all for your replies, I have downloaded the fonts so I am able to see the chinese writing now. I now see how the version I have is simplified, is it an accurate translation of her name though?...thank you all

Jason

[smithsgj]

Jason, what the contributors have offered is a *transliteration* of the name, not a translation. In English, the name Alexis consists of three syllables, a ... lek ... sis. Apart from the first, these syllable sounds are not available in Chinese (in the same way as "ktlap" is not available in English, even though it could be in some language like Hungarian or something for all I know).

艾麗西絲 would be pronounced ai-li-xi-si (that's Pinyin: try reading eye-lee-she-suh out as if it was English and you'll get a rough idea of the sound). Not perfect, but about as close to Alexis as you're going to get.

Then Quest suggested that in Chinese 艾麗西施 (eye-lee-she-shuh) is a prettier name to Chinese ears/eyes. Also, Calvin thought that 艾麗克西絲 (eye-lee-kuh-she-suh) would be better because it has the 'k' sound that is present in Alexis (because 'x' is really 'k' + 's').

The name Alexis actually means "Defender of Mankind", apparently. If you wanted that in Chinese it obviously wouldn't come out sounding anything like Alexis.

[Guest therealj]

thank you, I understand now