babelfish name transliteration

[Jake Perry]

out of the blue i typed in my name and got a transliteration

peter paul and mary comes out as - 彼得保罗 和玛丽

so i tried andrew just for good measure - 安德鲁

are these transliterations solid? is this a new short cut?

[gougou]

Many names have standard transliterations. I take it that Babelfish will have been fed with the most important names. If you have a fairly common name, and are happy to just go with a standard transliteration, then you should be fine with using Babelfish. If you prefer a unique name, you'll be better served here.

[Jake Perry]

lost in translation i believe... my question is this:

is babelfish an easy route to check official government transliterations

or do they have their own system for arriving at hanzi for english names?

[gougou]

Are you sure that there are official government transliterations? I thought there were only commonly used ones.

[Jake Perry]

from what you are saying everyone with the surname Jones

who immigrates to China will have a different and random

set of characters to represent their english last name. really?

[skylee]

People immigrate to China?

We've discussed about national standards on geographical names' transliteration here before (http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/277-dream-of-the-red-mansionchamber5). I guess there is some sort of standard (like ISO) for tranliteration of people's names as well. But you also probably know that even international political figures' names have different Chinese transliterations.

[Jake Perry]

SOME people happen to think that China is... rather nice.

i'm sure somebody somewhere immigrated. sounds quick...

all the traffic would be in the oncoming lane. =P

[BrandeX]

immigration has been illegal until recently afaik, and now its just nearly impossible?

[Jake Perry]

that's news to me. really bad news!

i guess all the people from abroad

living in China are permatourists. =(

[Lu]

The best ways to find the official/common transliteration of a foreign name is typing the name in google and add something Chinese. If it's the name of a famous person, wikipedia also works very, very well. Find the person in the English (or whichever language) version, then click zhongwen.

[imron]

rom what you are saying everyone with the surname Jones who immigrates to China will have a different and random set of characters to represent their english last name.

Yep, similar to the way that many Chinese people use different spellings of their Chinese names when they go to an English speaking country, e.g. Lee/Li Zhang/Chang Wong/Wang etc etc.