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This is actually a common problem in newspapers and television in Singapore, where the original report may have been filed by a reporter who did not or cannot use Chinese. In these cases, the author simply chooses phonetically matching characters to fill in the name of the person, then add (音) or (译音) to indicate that the name shown is only a phonetic ...

I can only provide a partial answer: Many of the characters used in the names of non-Han ethnic groups were originally derogatory. After the founding of the PRC, the government conceptualized New China as a 多民族国家, and they changed many of the characters that were perceived as derogatory. I don't know if this process started under the 国民党, as you suggest, ...

In the PRC, the official agency that decides this seems to be the 中国地名委员会 (China Commission on Place Names). They published a book called 外国地名译名手册 (Reference Book of Translated Foreign Place Names), which according to this Baidupedia entry includes the official translations of 18,000 place names plus general rules for translating place names from several ...

In all the news reports in Mainland China, "中东" refers to Middle East. This can be seen as a convention -- as a native speaker, if I hear "中东", I will definately think of the Middle East. You can take a look at the Wikipedia Page of 中东, and the Baidu Baike Page of 中东. Only one meaning is referred on both pages -- Middle East. If anyone wants to refer to ...

To elaborate on Kabie's comments: In general, the answer is that you never know for sure what is the right translation without further information but only a Pinyin of the name. However, the clue for guessing the right family names comes from experience in real life for native speakers. E.g. Li is highly probably to be 李, Wang for 王, Zhang for 张, Liu for ...

Usually people ask. Like people asking if a person's name is spelled a certain way, most Chinese people ask if it is a certain character. E.g., Your surname is 'Li'? Is that 'Li/李' as in plum (李子) or 'Li/理' as in reason (理由) ? There are commonly used names, but it's usually better to ask if you don't know. For exercises, the picking the actual character is ...

You clarified your question in a comment that your starting point is the Pinyin. I'm not sure why this would ever be a starting point in real life for a Chinese name, but the analogous situation in spoken Chinese is quite common. There is no general solution, of course, since syllables as pronounced do not map to unique characters. So if you don't know ...

多米尼加 is an acceptable short form of 多米尼加共和国. Though the Wikipedia page lists 多米尼加共和国 as the primary name for the Dominican Republic, the sidebar says, "通称：多米尼加", i.e., "Commonly called 多米尼加." The Baidu page on 多米尼加 is about the Dominican Republic, and Google results for 多米尼加 return pages about the Dominican Republic. A quick search reveals that 多米尼加 is also ...

Your question is totally wrong on itself! “犭”（反犬旁/犬部） is a radical of Chinese Characters (Han-Zi,汉字) which is only for forming/making up some single Chinese Characters. In the creating era aka ancient times, people used “犭”(a radical, the variant of 犬 i.e. dogs) to make some Characters which is with some relation to beast such as ...

The other posters have already answered the meat of the question: in most cases, there isn't a way to tell except by asking. As GTK mentions, one way of solving this ambiguity is to reference another use for the character. Another common strategy that hasn't been mentioned yet, though, is to describe the character by radical. (This is true not only of ...

First of all, let's confirm the translation. If you look for "Dominican Republic" on Wikipedia, and then choose the chinese page, the result is: 多米尼加共和国 Duō mǐ ní jiā gòng hé guó So, yes, it's the right translation. If you don't like Wikipedia as the only source, this is confirmed by the YouDao and CEDICT dictionaries. I tried searching for "多米尼加" ...

pinyinplaces.com has an extensive list of countries, cities, and states and provinces. I contacted the author, and he said he compiled the lists by buying a bunch of atlases and country maps from Chinese bookstores and culling the transliterations from them.