How do we know what characters correspond to Chinese names?

Question

Recently I've asked "How do we choose the correct characters for a westerner name?", and now, I'm facing a similar, yet kind of different problem, which I think applies to any westerner or Chinese student at a beginner level.

There are two exercises that ask to translate some sentences, which are not that hard, thanks to the glossary, but I've faced a small, nonetheless daunting difficulty, which is the translation of Chinese names.

When I have to translate a sentence like "Mr. Hu/Huang/... is a lawyer", how do I know which character corresponds to that name? Are there any guidelines for selecting the right character (apart from asking the person directly)?

Answer 1

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 translation of the person's name and not the actual characters.

An example can be found in this article from the local newspaper 《联合早报》

被告谢国安（26岁，译音）共面对12项控状，包括四项冒充欺骗、两项麻醉物法令、三项偷窃，以及欺骗、失信和伤人罪状各一项。昨天他被判坐牢1年又10个月。

Answer 2

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 刘, etc. Because you gradually gain this knowledge when you meet people around you who have different family names.

This can be a difficult task for foreigners, so as mentioned by Kabie, the 百家姓 is a great source for you to learn the statistics and major family names.

In the English wiki page, I did not find a statistics, but found in the Chinese wiki page. As shown, the top 10 (full list in the page) family names in Mainland China are:

in form of Rank. Family name Population(million)

01.王(Wang) 92

02.李(Li)90

03.张(Zhang)85

04.刘(Liu)67

05.陈(Chen)58

06.杨(Yang)40

07.黄(Huang)31

08.孙(Sun)26

09.周(Zhou)25

10.吴(Wu)24

This will help to get the clue.

Answer 3

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 arbitrary. As long as it sounds right it should be fine.

Answer 4

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 you have to ask or guess. For family names, of course, the 百家姓 is the best reference, and provides an educated guess. For given names it's very common to refer, when introducing a name, to external uses that specify the character. My daughter, for example, is named Nora. Her Chinese given name is 南蕊. She can introduce herself in Chinese by saying 我叫南蕊，南京的南，花蕊的蕊. This is unambiguous so long as someone knows the external reference.

In your exercise with Huang and Hu, you should just pick the most commonly used surnames for each.

Answer 5

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 proper names, but of all character questions in general.) For this reason, it's useful to know the colloquial names for common radicals.

For instance, the radical 氵, which appears on the left side of many water-related words, comes from the character 水 (shǔi, "water"). As such, this radical is called "三点水" (sāndiǎnshǔi, "three dots of water"). Someone trying to describe the character 鸿 (hóng, a common character in boy's names) might call it "三点水的鸿" ("the hóng with the water radical").

This document (pdf) lists several common radicals and their colloquial names; if you can read Chinese, the Chinese wikipedia's page on radicals has a more complete list.