Comment by uranusjr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by uranusjr | Hacker News Reader

As a native Chinese speaker, I find several points in the article a bit awkward to comprehend, especially when you flip the table around. It might be likely less than sophisticated for Françoise Duchamps to call herself Fran Swazzy in English (I don’t think so), but I struggle to think she’d have trouble using simply “Frances” without a last name if she goes to a hypothetical English-speaking place where residents don’t understand much French.

I also don’t understand the author’s lack of love to just using the straight phonetic translation (either first-last or only first/last name).[1] Sure it’s nice to have a Chinese name that sounds familiar, but would you expect your (say) Indian immigrant colleague to adapt an English-sounding name when moving to Canada? Yeah, we don’t mind you using your native name either.

Oh and the semantics don’t matter either. Lietarally zero native Chinese speaker would read 希拉里 and think “huh, hope pull inside, wierd name”, we recognise immediately it’s foreign, just like you know Kazuhiko and Jinping don’t have Bible reference. Heck, we don’t even think too much about meanings of our own names that often. When’s the last time you see a guy named Chris and think how he bears Christ?

Anyway. I don’t dislike the article, especially the latter part where the author digs into actual examples. It is always a fun exercise to read Chinese names, I do that a lot as well. But it’s just that, fun exercise. That’s not how we read names in daily life, and as long as you’re happy with your Chinese-character-spelled names (be it Chinese-style or otherwise), we are happy to use it. Over-interpreting people’s names (especially non-native speakers’), now that’s unsophisticated.

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[1]: I am Taiwanese, so maybe there’s some cultral different to communities with China origin.

The author is not Chinese. It is common for people who study a foreign language to get a passion for things that to them seems more authentic.

For example, many learners of Japanese consider English loan words inferior to Sino Japanese words, even though in modern Japanese, they are equally Japanese.

I was always amused that "pine" street in San Francisco is transliterated to "plank" in chinese. Broadway, incidentally, is "avenue of 100 old people".

Another example: the Chinese name for SF is Laojinshan (老金山) afaik, which translates to Old Gold Mountain and sounds nothing like Hispanic/English name. I think it dates back to the California gold rush

It's 旧金山 (jiu jin shan), but otherwise you're right.

And in case anyone was wondering, the "New Gold Mountain" is another name for Melbourne[0].

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=%E6%96%B0%E9%87%91%E5%B1%B1

The Melbourne Gold rush was in the 1850s-1860s so the "new" part has become inaccurate.

See also: "New Forest", England, 1079.

>The Melbourne Gold rush was in the 1850s-1860s so the "new" part has become inaccurate.

It also happened just a few years (very much less than a decade) after the California Gold Rush, and there were other gold rushes after that, so I'm not sure why it's "new" either.

啊呀, it seems I wasn't awake enough yet when posting. Thank you for the correction.

re: Broadway - it's because the Chinese name is borrowed from NYC's Broadway - 百老匯.

Chinese translators really like to translate names and locations which impart some meaning but still sound kinda similar to actual word. Bai-lao-hui sounds kinda like Broadway to a Chinese person. Also, presumably NYC's Broadway is an avenue of a hundred old people because affluent (older) people go to watch musicals more.

Yes, I’d agree that in general the clean and widely accepted thing to do would just be to transliterate the names using the usual set of naming characters. Chinese people really do not care about the semantics of foreign names, just as Westerners will usually ignore the connotations of foreign names (unless especially weird, e.g. “Long Wang”).

However, in the communities where these politicians are campaigning, there’s a really sizable number of Chinese voters, and I think the thinking is that a more native Chinese name will be more memorable for people. Foreign names are often less memorable than native ones, and if someone doesn’t define their Chinese name at all, multiple transliterations can arise which affects searchability. After all, as a politician, your name is a big part of your brand.

If you accept that premise, then spending time to choose an appropriate name is an important step - after all, semantics do matter to some extent for native names in any language. Perhaps not to the extent shown in this article, but (for example) you would not want to accidentally choose a name that misgenders you or (worse) offends your voters.

> I also don’t understand the author’s lack of love to just using the straight phonetic translation (either first-last or only first/last name)

Yes, this is especially strange given that the Chinese script evolution was mainly phonetically driven. Most characters cames from writing a word with a same sounding word then disambiguate it by adding a determinative (radical). Even in the PRC simplification scheme, one of the key method was to replace an existing character by one that is read the same (which overload the meaning of a single character).

> Sure it’s nice to have a Chinese name that sounds familiar, but would you expect your (say) Indian immigrant colleague to adapt an English-sounding name when moving to Canada? Yeah, we don’t mind you using your native name either.

In the Indian case probably not, but in my (European) country people are often glad that Chinese people have a local name, even if they find it funny. Chinese phonology can be quite hard for foreigners, and the pinyin system with consonants that are not transparent (h, j, q, x, zh, ch) and hide some vowel letters doesn't help at all when names are written down. I noticed for instance that I'm the only foreigner calling my Taiwanese girlfriend by her Chinese name or a derivative, while other people don't even ask her given name past the English one she chose for herself.

>Sure it’s nice to have a Chinese name that sounds familiar, but would you expect your (say) Indian immigrant colleague to adapt an English-sounding name when moving to Canada?

I remember watching a comedian doing a bit about this phenomenon of people adopting names from other cultures, where there were two Caucasian ladies at an ashram, both called Lakshmi, and an Indian lady by the name of Pam. I wish I could find a video of this.

I’m a Chinese language learner (native English speaker) and I was also kind of surprised by some points in the article. Listing out “Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton” struck me as a particularly weird example - no Chinese newspaper would ever give that full name - they’d probably just refer to her as 希拉里. I enjoyed the article but it definetly misunderstood some things.

The author literally said that he read that in a newspaper, so one of you is wrong.

Spend 20+ years in Taiwan and China here: most media use 希拉里.

There might be specific conventions which compel them to print the full name (if it's a very formal thing?) but they'd do it once maybe, then revert to 希拉里.

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