Help with a name translation please

[loggs]

Hi

Iam looking at getting a tattoo of both my childrens names. I wonder if someone could help with the symbols for the names Oliver & Joshua as 2 separate set of symbols. I would probably want this tattooed vertically.

Many Thanks

[imron]

You probably want to read this thread, which explains why this is perhaps not a good idea, and gives some better suggestions if you really want a Chinese tattoo related to your children.

[loggs]

Thanks Imron

Yes i understand that it is not as simple to translate from an English name to Chinese.

I have been supplied with the attachments for the names Oliver & Joshua can you confirm what they actually mean.

Many Thanks

[renzhe]

They read "Ao li fu" and "qiao shu ya", and mean "obscure benefit not" and "tall book Asia", but these are characters which are commonly used for transliteration and it's obvious that this is a transliteration, so people probably won't try to read any meaning into it other than the pronunciation.

You should, however, be aware that you're actually tattooing "obscure benefit not" and "tall book Asia" on yourself and not "Oliver" or "Joshua".

[loggs]

Many Thanks

I suspected that they wern't actually the names. Do you know of other similar languages that have actaully name translations? I really like the style of the Chinese language and would like sonethimg similar rather than a tattoo of the English names.

[renzhe]

The problem is that you can't always "translate" names.

In some cases, there are names which mean the same things in different languages. For example, "Joseph" is called "Josip" in South-Slavic languages like Croatian, and "Yousuf" in Arabic. It's the exact same name. "John" is "Ivan" in Slavic languages and "Johann" in German, etc. This is a real translation -- the same name in different languages.

Chinese and other Eastern languages don't have the same names, and they create names very differently. So there is no correspondence, and for Western names, they approximate the sound roughly, and there is a set of transliterations used for common names, you listed two yourself. But it's not particularly elegant, nor is it a translation -- it's simply as close as you can get to representing the sound with a script that's completely different from English.

What some people do is to take an alphabet like Japanese katakana or the Arabic or Greek script and then try to transliterate the name using that, but it will never sound exactly the same for the same reasons. It won't have any weirdo meanings (unlike the Chinese transliterations), but it will only be a rough approximation in any case. And as far as I know, the Japanese and Arabs also tend to ridicule people who tattoo katakana or Arabic script on themselves.

I do agree that Chinese characters are very pretty, but if you want to tattoo something on yourself, it is far far better and less embarrassing to tattoo something with a meaning, because Chinese characters carry the meaning and the reading is basically secondary. Get a concept you really like, or a line from a classic poem that you think represents you, or something like that.

[skylee]

While it is usually not possible to "translate" a foreign name into a Chinese name, as imron et al have been telling everyone who requests it, there is no reason that one should not get a Chinese name based on the original name, as long as one knows that it is not a translation, but a Chinese name chosen based on the original name.

For example, Joshua is a name that can be found in the bible, and is expressed as 約書亞 in Chinese bible. (In case anyone is not aware, I write in traditional Chinese.) If you like it, then it is fine.

I personally do not support tattooing.

[lemur]

Getting Hanzi (Chinese characters) tattooed onto oneself is a bad idea. This site should provide enough proof of that:

http://www.hanzismatter.com/

The latest entry, "Leah", is really striking and tragic example of how tattoo artists can mangle Hanzi. The artist took two characters and chopped that up into three parts. Result: gibberish.

And that's the problem. Tattoo artists usually do not know Chinese and are not calligraphists. So they think they can jazz up a design when in fact they are introducing blatantly stupid mistakes like the "Leah" case or more subtle mistakes which don't look like gibberish but still would look as bad as misspellings do in English. That is, you'd want to avoid those mistakes in the same way you'd want to avoid having "Oilvre" tattooed on instead of "Oliver".