How and why to find a suitable Chinese name

People who know nothing about Chinese often ask me how to write their names in Chinese characters. The answer is that you can’t. Names in Chinese are fundamentally different in a way that makes converting names problematic.

The problem is that to write something in Chinese, you need to use Chinese characters, the pronunciation of which is limited to some 400 syllables, ignoring tones. This might sound like a lot, but English has more than 10,000 syllables.

Why names translated into Chinese sound weird

It follows then that if phonetic accuracy is your goal, you’re unlikely to get very far, or even close. Naturally, many sounds are different from English, but the syllable structure is the main issue. For example, syllables in Mandarin can’t end with consonants except -n, -ng and -r.

Another difference is that Chinese characters mean something, so if you only focus on what your name sounds like, you have to sacrifice meaning completely. Or the other way around; it’s up to you.

So, in other words, you can choose either a name that sounds a bit like your English name or one with a related meaning, but not both.

Names transcribed into Chinese

Both these methods are used to write foreign names in Chinese. They are called 音译 and 意译. Foreign personal names in Chinese are almost always based on sound, but things like place names can be based on meaning (e.g. 冰岛 for “Iceland”).

Sound translations are sometimes fairly close to the original pronunciation, but sometimes so far off that they feel unrelated. This can be for non-obvious reasons, such as a word entering Mandarin via another dialect where the pronunciation makes more sense.

When I teach beginner courses in Chinese, I usually play a small guessing game with the students where I say a few names of famous people in Chinese, and they are supposed to guess whom they refer to. This is easy for cases like 貝多芬 (Bèiduōfēn), Ludwig van Beethoven, but impossible for cases like 福爾摩斯 (Fúěrmósī), Sherlock Holmes.

For more about foreign names in Chinese and the challenges they cause us learners, please read Lost in transcription: Saylaw, Ice Island and Aristotle.

Lost in transcription: Saylaw, Ice Island and Aristotle

Gram Advantage Thus Earlobe Man

The meanings of the characters have nothing to do with the name. At best, auspicious or neutral characters are chosen over those with decidedly negative connotations, but only in rare cases are the meanings of the characters related to the name.

This leads to a lot of nonsense, so if you translate the meaning of some common English names written in Chinese, all you get is slightly amusing gibberish:

• 喬納森 (Qiáonàsēn) Jonathan = tall admit forest
• 伊麗莎白 (Yīlìshābái) Elizabeth = that beautiful kind of sedge grass white
• 克利斯朵夫 (Kèlìsīduǒfū) Christopher = gram advantage thus earlobe man

While this might be slightly inaccurate, it still illustrates the point: foreign names directly transcribed with Chinese characters don’t make much sense and don’t really work well as names in Chinese at all. They neither sound like the original name nor mean anything in Chinese.

Chinese personal names often have two characters, sometimes one, but it’s exceedingly rare to have more. Family names often have just one character, but sometimes two. This clearly doesn’t match name traditions in English.

Finding a good Chinese name for yourself

If you think all of this is just slightly amusing and you’re okay with being called Gram Advantage Thus Earlobe Man, then that’s perfectly okay. That’s what is going to happen if you don’t take action and allow someone to just find a Chinese name for you (perhaps a bored official when you apply for something in China or your overloaded, poor Chinese teacher).

I certainly wasn’t okay with this, and if you feel the same, you need to find a suitable name for yourself. This means finding a name that follows Chinese name traditions, means something that’s related to you in some way, and, if you’re lucky, sounds vaguely like your original name. Achieving all three is very hard.

There are at least three ways you can go about this practically:

1. Try to find a good Chinese name yourself by selecting characters you like and/or that sound like your name, sticking only to characters with good meanings. You might have to be quite flexible on the “sound like your name” part, but that’s okay. The default is one character for the family name and two for the personal name, but there are other variants.
2. Steal the name or parts of it from a real Chinese person. If you’ve seen a name that you like for some reason (after checking what it means), combine this with your own family name. It might be a good idea to avoid very famous people, though. Always check the result with a Chinese person to see what they associate the name you’ve chosen with to avoid embarrassing combinations.
3. Ask a Chinese person who knows you for help in finding a name that both sounds good and matches your personality. This isn’t easy, so if you ask someone who doesn’t know you well, you might get a half-hearted response. Coming up with a good name is not easy!

Whatever you do, you have to check your name with several native speakers!

This is especially true if you use the first two methods, as it is very likely that you will pick names that don’t work very well or have unintended effects. If you’re okay with having a name that you think is cool but just sounds really weird to Chinese people, that’s fine, but you should at least know about it.

After you’ve listened to suggestions and opinions from a few native speakers, you should be okay. Also, note that it’s absolutely crucial that you ask native speakers rather than advanced second language learners like me! A good Chinese name has to take into account connotations and emotions, something which is very, very hard to grasp for us foreigners, regardless of how long we’ve studied Chinese.

My Chinese name: 凌雲龍

To make this article slightly more concrete and personal, I’d like to share with you the story behind my name, which I adopted before moving to Taiwan in 2008.

My Chinese name is 凌雲龍/凌云龙 (Líng Yún-lóng). The personal name is taken from a movement, Cloud Dragon Playing in Water (雲龍戲水), in the sabre form in the style of Tai Chi Chuan I used to practise. I’ve always liked both the movement and the name; the contrast between a high-flying creature and the low-lying water.

The family name matches the personal name quite well since it means “soaring”. It also sounds like my surname in Swedish (Linge), but that’s mostly an accident. Finally, part of my name forms part of some ambitious idioms, like 凌雲壯志, which means to have lofty aspirations.

I decided to get my own Chinese name when I received a scholarship to study Mandarin in Taiwan for a year. On the form, there was a separate field for the applicant’s Chinese name, and I figured that if I didn’t get one myself, I would end up being called Gram Advantage Thus Earlobe Man or something to that effect.

How I learnt Chinese, part 3: My first year in Taiwan

Instead, I spent a couple of hours generating names I thought were okay (I had studied Chinese for about nine months at the time) and then asked my teacher about some of the ideas. Thus, I came up with my name myself, but I received help along the way.

That’s seventeen years ago now. I have been called by my Chinese name almost as much as my Swedish name during that time, and today, both names are part of who I am.

I think it’s a good Chinese name, although the three consecutive second tones are a bit annoying to pronounce (but also a good illustration of a little-known phonological rule).

Taiwanese people often say it sounds a bit like a wuxia character, and people from the mainland tend to say it sounds like it comes from a drama set during the war against the Japanese during the Second World War, but there are also real Chinese people with the same personal name.

Thinking about my Chinese name, it’s hard to imagine what it would be like to have another name, just like it is for my Swedish name.

Wuxia, a key to Chinese language and culture

What’s your Chinese name?

What’s your Chinese name and the story behind it? Are you happy with your Chinese name? Do you have any funny stories about other people’s Chinese names?

If you don’t have one yet, what do you think about the various issues brought up in this article? Do you think a sound-based name is preferable, even if the characters don’t mean anything coherent?

Please leave a comment!