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Transliteration of foreign names

Posted: Thu Jun 03, 2004 11:12 am
by Waerdisi
Hi everybody,

is there a set of characters that are used only for transliteration? I started learning chinese characters to transliterate Latvian names. As far as I can understand these ~220 characters I have learned are always the same except for some that could confuse a Chinese reader and let him think that Anna is a boy, if a wrong "na" is used. Am I right? In one word to say, my name Valdis can be transliterated only as WaErDiSi, Dnepropetrovsk as DeNiePuLuoPeiTeLuoFuSiKe, a.s.o. and always with the same characters. Or maybe every chinese person would write my name slightly or sometimes even totally differently?

Re: Transliteration of foreign names

Posted: Fri Jun 04, 2004 12:12 am
by Aaron
You're right about how some characters are used more often than others to translate names.

Different Chinese people COULD translate the names differently, though.
I think that it also depends on which dialect is being spoken to translate the name.

But, essentially, I think that there would be only a few variations and differences.

Aaron