Help Translating

[AdeTjan]

I need help converting Chinese characters on my gran grandpa's tomb(attachment).

My purpose is to know which character is my surname which should be the same with my grandpa's.

Thanks.

[imron]

By my reckoning, your grandfather's surname was 曾 which is pronounced Zēng in standard Mandarin. You might want to wait for a native speaker to weigh in though.

[Guoke]

顯考諱錦耀曾府君之佳城

顯妣諱從娘韓孺人之壽域

顯顯

妣考

諱諱

從錦

娘耀

韓曾

孺府

人君

之之

壽佳

域城

[AdeTjan]

Thank you for your help. I thought my surname was Tjan.

[imron]

Different accents/dialects of Chinese will pronounce the character 曾 in different ways, and even in places where the pronunciation is the same, there might be multiple different acceptable ways to represent that character with the English alphabet, or a person with that name might just have made up their own approximation of the spelling in English. The pronunciation I listed is romanised using pinyin, which is based on the pronuciation of standard Mandarin.

[AdeTjan]

Correct me if I am wrong, I think that pinyin is based of pronunciation. However, I am looking for a way to "write" my surname, not to pronounce it.

Can you give me the other romanized forms of 曾, and give me a recommendation which one I should "write" as my surname?

[gato]

Thank you for your help. I thought my surname was Tjan.

wikipedia has an entry on your name. hehe

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeng

[AdeTjan]

Wow, thanks it's very helpful.

[imron]

However, I am looking for a way to "write" my surname, not to pronounce it.

That's easy. It is written 曾. If you mean to write it using English letters however, how else do you do it besides pronunciation? It's then a matter of choosing which pronunciation to base it on. The different variations provided on the Wikipedia page (Zeng, Tseng, Tsang, Chan, Tjan) are all the same in that they are just ways of "pronouncing" this character. You then need to decide which one is more appropriate for you.