Chinese names into Japanese

[Kevin Kirton]

Hello honyakkers,

A quick question about how to transliterate (is that the word?)
Chinese names into Japanese. The names are:

李卓宏 and 楊文鈞

Any help appreciated.

Kevin Kirton
Cooma, Australia

[Matthew Schlecht]

On Thu, May 8, 2014 at 8:07 PM, Kevin Kirton <kpki...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hello honyakkers,

A quick question about how to transliterate (is that the word?)
Chinese names into Japanese. The names are:

李卓宏   and  楊文鈞

     One option is to leave them as is and let Japanese figure out how to pronounce them.  The way Chinese say 東京 as Dōng​jīng.

     In pinyin these names are Lǐ Zhuóhóng and Yáng Wénjūn.  The tones especially are going to be difficult going into monotonic Japanese.

     On the off chance someone had done the furigana for this already, I googled "李卓宏" "リ" in Japanese Google, but got no hits.

     My best guess in katakana would be リジュオホング and ヤングウェンジュン.

     HTH.

Matthew Schlecht, PhD
Word Alchemy
Newark, DE, USA
wordalchemytranslation.com

[Benjamin Barrett]

Wiktionary provides transliterations for Chinese characters. For example, https://ja.wiktionary.org/wiki/李.

Benjamin Barrett
Formerly of Seattle, WA

Learn Ainu! https://sites.google.com/site/aynuitak1/videos

[Doreen Simmons]

The real question is, of course, which part of China are they from?  Way back in the 1960 when I was in Singapore the Chinese could not speak to each other in Chinese since at that time Mandarin had not been introduced in schools. The only means of communication was English (white-collar) and Malay (blue-collar). I recall the time when the Straits Times was trying to find the winner of one of its competitions and then finally found that the name, sent in in Chinese characters, was Fukien which was totally different from the Cantonese reading they had used for the original announcement.  What you are dealing with is a common written language that covers something like most languages of Europe.

Doreen Simmons

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[Yoshi Shibasaki]

If you are translating into Japanese, you do not need to do anything to the names in Chinese characters.

Yoshi Shibasaki

[Benjamin Barrett]

On the page I cited, it has:

李 *

• ローマ字表記

• 普通話

• ピンイン: lǐ (li3)

• ウェード式: li3

• 広東語

• イェール式: lei5

• 閩南語

• POJ: lí

• 客家語

• 白話字: lí

• 呉語

• ピンイン: li2

• 中古音: *liə̌

Of course, there are many, many more possibilities. 

I usually use the English version, so I don't know how complete the Japanese Wiktionary is, but it's a really good resource. BB

[Jeremy Whipple]

On Fri, May 9, 2014 at 9:07 AM, Kevin Kirton <kpki...@gmail.com> wrote:

A quick question about how to transliterate (is that the word?)
Chinese names into Japanese. The names are:

李卓宏   and  楊文鈞

On Fri, May 9, 2014 at 6:56 PM, Yoshi Shibasaki <yo...@easynet.co.uk> wrote:

If you are translating into Japanese, you do not need to do anything to the names in Chinese characters.

Yoshi Shibasaki

Indeed. The above names (which are presented in Japanese-style kanji, not simplified Chinese characters) require no translation or transliteration for use in a Japanese text.

What exactly to you mean by transliterate in this case? Do you want to express the names in katakana, perhaps?

Tangentially, as a general matter, if you have a name in simplified or traditional Chinese (e.g., from a Chinese-language website or other electronic document) that you need to put into Japanese, you can paste it into the conversion window at this site:

http://www.jcdic.com/chinese_convert/index.php 

This nifty conversion engine will take input in Chinese (traditional or simplified) hanzi or Japanese kanji and show the corresponding characters in all three styles, along with the readings in pinyin—which of course are useful if you're translating into English.

But this may not help the OP.

FWIW

Jeremy Whipple

Setagaya-ku, Tokyo

[Jeremy Whipple]

On Sat, May 10, 2014 at 10:40 AM, Jeremy Whipple <jeremy....@gmail.com> wrote:

What exactly to you mean by transliterate in this case? Do you want to express the names in katakana, perhaps?

I just found a site that will transliterate Chinese characters into (what looks to me like) their standard katakana renderings:

http://dokochina.com/katakana.php

Note, btw, that syllable final -ng in Chinese is normally transliterated  「ン」 in Japanese (same as -n). So 「楊」(Yang) comes out as 「ヤン」.

Jeremy Whipple

Setagaya-ku, Tokyo

[Kevin Kirton]

Thanks for all the replies, especially those of Matthew Schlecht and
Jeremey Whipple.

By "transliteration," I meant the katakana that is given above or
after non-Japanese kanji names, such as this one from today's Yomiuri:
中国外務省の 華春瑩 （ フアチュンイン ） .
Is transliteration the wrong word? And surely it's not generally
acceptable in Japanese publishing just to give the kanji only without
a katakana reading?

Interestingly, your guesses, Matthew, for:
李卓宏 and 楊文鈞

which were:
リジュオホング and ヤングウェンジュン

came out very close to those offered by the site suggested by Jeremey
(http://dokochina.com/katakana.php), which were:
リー ヂュオ ホン and ヤン ウェン ジュン

My guess is that there is no real "correct" transliteration, just a
commonly accepted one or a self-chosen one?

Would anyone object to these:
リ・ジュオ・ホン　ヤン・ウエン・ジュン　？
(I suppose the nakaten are unnecessary? Or OK?)

Kevin Kirton
Cooma, Australia

[Fred Uleman]

Maybe we should call this "rubying" the names?

"ruby" (v) to supply the ルビ (readings) for kanji terms

Just made that up, but . . .

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Fred Uleman