Do You Have Your Chinese Name?

Amid the enthusiasm of finding meanings to domain names, have you wondered how names of non-Chinese companies and people are handled in China?

First, look at some famous brands. Apple’s Chinese name is 苹果, which is obtained via translation where its meaning remains the same in Chinese. Similarly, Microsoft becomes 微软 (translation).

On the other hand, Google becomes 谷歌, which is obtained via transliteration where the Chinese name rhymes with the English name but the meaning has changed to “valley song”. Transliteration is used in this case probably because the original name is a made-up word which has no meaning.

Here, you may notice how short the Chinese names are. Also, they tend to have two characters, which is why I see 2L and 2-pin domain names having the biggest potential in China’s corporate world.

Let’s look at some companies in the domain industry.

Both .club registry and .xyz registry have no Chinese names but are simply referred to by their English names. Mind+Machines is 明智墨思.

Godaddy does not have an official Chinese name yet it’s got an unofficial one which is not elegant in my opinion. 狗爹 means “dog daddy” because “dog” rhymes with “go”.

Now, let’s look at names of some well-known people in the domain industry. Toby Hall (M+M) is 何拓; Colin Campbell (.club) is 柯博尔; and Lori Anne Wardi (NeuStar) is 罗莉安.

I particularly like the Chinese name of Lori Anne Wardi because it is very beautiful. How did she get this beautiful name? Probably via rhyming. The trick is to find good Chinese characters that rhyme with part of a name.

In this case, only Lori An is used in forming the Chinese name. Lo rhymes with 罗 (LUO) which is a common Chinese family name. ri An rhymes with 莉安 (Li An). 莉 means jasmine and 安 peace and safe, which are beautiful and elegant words. Names of most Chinese have 3 characters.

Finally, do you recognize the name 石仁康? It’s the Chinese name of Rick Schwartz I got when I used a translation site. If Rick can have a Chinese name, why can’t you?

You can get your Chinese name too. Just find a site that can translate your name to Chinese. One of them is www.mandarintools.com/chinesename.html. I like this site because it also explains the meaning of each character in your Chinese name. Try it yourself. If you have any question, shoot me an email.

This first appeared on Coreile.com