Translation Help Needed

[Golem Joe]

Hey there,

Anyone out there fluent in Chinese (any one dialect)? I'm throwing some names together for a project and would like the translation to come off better than my laughable attempts to create words that look Chinese. Online dictionaries have been no help as the seem to have a problem putting Chinese words into English characters.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Golem Joe]

*bump*

 

[pensiv]

the Chinese section of www.pantheon.org has a lot of Chinese divinity that you can use as names.

also, here is the Kalabarians list of Chinese names
http://www.kabalarians.com/male/chinesem.htm
http://www.kabalarians.com/female/chinesef.htm

 

[tarchon]

I'd stay away from the Kabalarian page. Many of those names aren't even Chinese. It's an assortment of Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, and a couple languages I can't identify, under several different Romanization conventions.

Chinese is pretty free with the naming conventions for personal names. There are certain elements that are more common than others (e.g. ping, hao, xiao), but nearly anything that doesn't mean something unlucky or obnoxious is fair game. Propitious-sounding names are usual, but nearly everyone who knows a lot of Chinese can think of some fairly weird combinations of characters used in a name. Family names are another story. There's a fairly limited pool of them, and the most common ones are very, very common. The top 5, Zhang, Li, Zhao, Wang, and Chen, are used by 20% of Chinese.

Most commonly, a name will consist of 3 syllables/characters (zi), a surname, like Mao, and a pair of syllables for the personal name, like Ze-Dong. It's not uncommon to find a single syllable for the personal name however. Two-syllable surnames are sometimes encountered, but they aren't especially common.

Mandarin Tools has a reasonably good generator, http://www.mandarintools.com/chinesename.html
Note however that choosing apt equivalent Chinese names for foreigners, as this does, is considered something of an art, so you might find aesthetic differences with the results of the generator.

See also
http://www.night.net/rosie/0397-names.html
http://elppa.uc.wlu.edu/~hhill/names.html

- Bian Baoning

 

[Hakkenshi]

Well I'm no expert on Chinese (though I AM a professional translator...), but this site seemed to me pretty good. Just bear in mind it's an online translator (i.e. chinese-english dictionary and vice-versa), and not a name generator.