Help with a translation please

[ruralscotland]

Can anyone help me with telling me what these characters translate into?

[skylee]

If only you would show us the photo.

[ruralscotland]

sorry......

[skylee]

A name or a place name, something like Kurland or Courland.

[ruralscotland]

Many thanks for that, it's supposed to be Kieran!!!

[renzhe]

Yeah, it literally sounds like gou er lan. It's phonetic, and looks like a transliteration of a foreign name. It doesn't really have a meaning.

[imron]

Many thanks for that, it's supposed to be Kieran!!!

Have a read of these threads to get an idea of why you can't really "translate" an English name into Chinese:

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/10886-chinese-characters-for-names

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/12372-name-translation

[roddy]

Actually I'm going to add those links to the sticky for the forum, people should be reading them before even posting. I may also email Jun Shan at about.com and see if he wants to sign up - then he can hand out Chinese names over there and come over here to say 'yes, it's correct'.

[renzhe]

To be honest, it's probably as close as you can get to "Kieran" in Chinese.

For example, the sound "Ki" doesn't exist in Chinese, so you'll have some combination of "gou", "kou", "ke", "ji" or "qi" instead.

[zhwj]

The standard transliteration of Kieran used in mainland news (Kieran Richardson, Kieran Culkin, etc) is 基兰, pronounced Jī-lán.

[huisheng]

Why don't you just ask Jun Shan directly?

[roddy]

I've emailed him.