Database of Chinese translations of given names?

Question

Is there a comprehensive/official list of Chinese transliterations of given names (i.e. first names)? I know that I can transliterate on my own, but such a database is useful because:

• I can look up common transliterations
• I can be aware of historical precedents (e.g. official transliteration of names of famous people)
• I can see cases where there is more than one common way to transliterate (perhaps a way that I had not thought of before)

Is there a database of Chinese transliteration of names? The database of names should ideally cover common Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Indian, and European given names. The database should also be easily parsed by computer software.

e.g.

Abdullah 阿卜杜拉
Abraham 亞伯拉罕
Ada 阿達
Adelardo 阿德拉多
Aditya 阿蒂塔
Adolphe 阿道夫
Adrien 阿德里安
...

Answer 1

the national academy fro educational research (國家教育研究院) of taiwan, maintained the bilingual data, several of these database are name related, and all of them are free to download 😸

學術名詞下載

entries started with “外國學者人名譯名” are your targets :) ranged from turkish, japanese, korean to italian and german.

if you want a shortcut, why foreign names was transliterated to particular chinese names, read the “?漢譯音參考表”, “?” is the original language. eg:

新1081017英漢譯音參考表20191017.pdf

德漢譯音參考表(170516修正).doc

have fun :)

Answer 2

You can use Chinese Wikipedia to do so.

Since you are mainly looking for transcriptions of famous people, it will suffice. Normally, the first sentence of the articles will feature the Mainland Chinese, Taiwan and Hong Kong versions of the transliterated names.

If you are looking for specific first names, you can search the name of a famous person, then check his/her Chinese Wikipedia page to find out the transliteration.

You can see that if you want to find the transliteration for “Teresa”, you can search Teresa May and the various transliterations come out.

Answer 3

If you download the CC-EDICT and use grep "(name)" cedict_ts.u8, it'll give a list:

丘爾金 丘尔金 [Qiu1 er3 jin1] /Churkin (name)/Vitaly I. Churkin (1952-), Russian diplomat, Ambassador to UN from 2006/
丹尼 丹尼 [Dan1 ni2] /Danny (name)/
丹尼斯 丹尼斯 [Dan1 ni2 si1] /Dennis (name)/
丹尼爾 丹尼尔 [Dan1 ni2 er3] /Daniel (name)/
亞伯拉罕 亚伯拉罕 [Ya4 bo2 la1 han3] /Abraham (name)/Abraham, father of Judaism and Islam in the Bible and Quran/same as Ibrahim 易卜拉辛/
亞倫 亚伦 [Ya4 lun2] /Aaron (name)/Yaren, capital of Nauru/
...
齊柏林 齐柏林 [Qi2 bo2 lin2] /Zeppelin (name)/Graf Ferdinand von Zeppelin (1838-1917), inventor of the Zeppelin dirigible airship/
龐德 庞德 [Pang2 De2] /Pang De (-219), general of Cao Wei at the start of the Three Kingdoms period, victor over Guan Yu 關羽|关羽/Pound (name)/Ezra Pound (1885-1972), American poet and translator/
龐氏 庞氏 [Pang2 shi4] /Ponzi (name)/Pond's (brand of skin care products), also written 旁氏/
龐茲 庞兹 [Pang2 zi1] /Ponzi (name)/
龔古爾 龚古尔 [Gong1 gu3 er3] /Goncourt (name)/