How do the Chinese look up famous names?

[woodcutter]

If a Chinese person knows a foreign name in English, perhaps of a celebrity, how do they go about writing it in Chinese? Would they usually look it up? If so, where? Or would most people just take a guess, based on other names they already know? How much variation is there in the way that foreign celebrities names are translated? (I've noticed there is some!).

[liuzhou]

I tend to search in Baidu. Searching for the English name often gives you the most common Chinese equivalent.

Or go to English Wikipedia, find the person you want, then click through to the Chinese Wiki.

There is a dictionary of official transliterations of foreign names. I've no idea what it's called though. And it can't be very up to date. I last saw it about 12 years ago.

[null]

We have this:

the dictionary was first published in 1993 and revised in 2007, the revised edtion includes 700,000 foreign names in 55 languages.

[self-taught-mba]

Wow. That's a big book. You think they could just use the English like how we use the Chinese names in English. But then Americans can't even pronounce "Beijing" yet without that French sounding "j" thing going on. Oh nevermind . . .

[renzhe]

That book is one big argument for a phonetic script

Wow.

Of course, other non-latin phonetic scripts also have some ambiguity when transcribing foreign names (Arabic, Cyrillic), but I don't think that anything like that book is necessary, at least I've never heard of such a book in Serbian, which transcribes foreign names into Cyrillic phonetically.

[roddy]

I'm not even sure it'd be that much use in this case - it might be handy if you're trying to give someone a Chinese name, but if you want to know what some famous person's name is actually written as you're going to need to check to see what common practice is. Stevenson can be 史蒂芬森 or 史蒂文森, for example. Or take your best guess, or use a dictionary like the one above*, but there's no guarantee that's what is actually used.

As it happens I used to work for the publisher of the above tome, and we had a room full stuff like that. Don't think anybody used it.

[Guest realmayo]

Americans can't even pronounce "Beijing" yet without that French sounding "j" thing going on

Same in the UK. But pronouncing it with the "soft" j is the correct way of pronouncing it in British & American English, I think.

[Hofmann]

J is never ʒ in English words.

ajar

eject

ejaculate

trojan

[Guest realmayo]

J is never ʒ in English words.

Irrelevant. Beijing isn't an English word. It's a Chinese one.

[null]

Here's a sample page of that dictionary, one of the most boring books i have seen:

[lokki]

J is never ʒ in English words.

Irrelevant. Beijing isn't an English word. It's a Chinese one.

As it happens it is not pronounced ʒ in Chinese either.

People go out of their way and "work to get it wrong" sticking a sound in there that is unnatural in source and target language alike.

[Guest realmayo]

Disagree: listen to how "Paris" is said in UK or US English. Very unlike the way the French say it. But if you pronounced it the French way in regular English conversation, people would think you were a nutter.

[woodcutter]

Thanks for the replies. Piddling about with Baidu or Wikipedia is what I do already, but sometimes that doesn't seem to be very easy. Wikipedia is very incomplete, and Baidu brings up a frustrating amount of sites where the name seems to be used in English amongst Chinese text all the time (it would help if I could scan the text more efficiently of course).

Surely not too many people have easy access to the fat books anyway, even assuming they are better for some names than the internet?

I thought there must be a better way, like some website tailored to that purpose. Does that mean that you would say there is a lot of guesswork and variation then?

[Hanlink]

There is a great deal of variations in names. Some of it is due to the locality, for example Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Mainland China may all have different characters for even famous names - look at how George Bush is transliterated in those three jurisdictions. There is no correct transliteration, it is just a matter of consistency.

[atitarev]

Transliteration into Chinese characters: 音译 or 译名

I recently added a small section in the article Transliteration into Chinese characters: Difference in the phonetic translation between different regions, just to explain possible variations. Feel free to add more.

[woodcutter]

It is interesting to see the templates linked in the wikipedia article for the syllables of the various languages. I don't suppose the average Chinese (including the average journalist?) would dream of using something like that, so for a not-all-that-famous name they would usually just guess based on their instinctive knowledge of how that system generally works, if they couldn't find it after a bit of internet fiddling, right?

[sylvia9ying]

In baidu!

and such as eminem = 埃米纳姆.