I mentioned upthread that my step-mom and many people in her family emigrated her from Hong Kong. One sister - Emily (who’s Chinese name I don’t know) came with her toddler son, whose first name was Chun Kit. There was no effort to change that until he went to school, where it was suggested that he might want to adopt a more American sounding name (in part, unfortunately, because he was on the heavier side, so a name that sounds similar to “Chunky” was a bad idea).
So, Chun Kit got to pick his American name. Being 6, and a huge fan of dinosaurs, the choice was easy - he became Rex.
(I’m estranged from that family, so I don’t know how long that stuck, but he’d be an adult now).
It’s not enough to just write your name using Chinese letters? What if you’re Manchu, or Uyghur, or Yi, or Malay, or Japanese? Are you forced to change your name? Also seems at odds (assuming Chinese linguistic and ethnic conformity are motivations) with Chinese picking English nicknames.
I was legally required to have a Chinese name when my wife and I got married. I never use it, but it’s on my Alien Registration Certificate, along with my American name.
It was cultural, but also, there are no such things as Chinese letters. How do you write “Jim” in Chinese? You don’t. You can approximate it: “Jimu,” but that, spoken, is meaningless. And it’s not just the given name we’re expected to take, but the whole three (or four) syllable Chinese name, because one is seldom referred to by only the given portion. Thus, “Da JiMu” kind of approximates my name, but certainly is not my name, because it can’t be written or pronounced in Chinese.
Come to think of it, I had to use my transliterated – but not translated – name on my marriage certificate in China.
But that’s exactly how cross-cultural exchanges work, by approximation. A huge number of Americans—I’m guessing well over half of us—have family names that are approximations if the original names.
I have a name that is never pronounced correctly by 90 percent of Americans, and not even by most Indian-Americans. But I would rather have people do their best to approximate my name than to just be a Tom, Dick, or Harry.
So, as a follow-up, are there other world leaders (from this century or the last) who had different official names used according to the language of the media in which they were used? Other than from Hong Kong?
As a tangent to the topic of this thread, that is a fascinating question. I would begin with Jim= James = Jacob = “supplanter”, “heel-catcher”, “leg-puller”, etc., and attempt to translate that.
Translating the surname is a similar problem, for cultures where there is a separate family name (what are you expected to do if you do not have one?)
Related to this, I learned from Wikipedia that there are still tens of thousands of rare Chinese characters not easily supported for computer input. I wonder what those people whose names include them are supposed to do?
Lastly, must the name written in Chinese characters “mean something”? What should we call Stalin in Chinese, or Genghis Khan? It seems I agree with Ascenray’s point.
For my wife and me, when we were planning on getting married in Hong Kong (before the changes in the law back in 2017 turned it into too much of a PITA for two people neither resident in HK to marry there), the forms involved required her real name be transliterated in English and the Chinese characters for her real name since she’s Korean.
I remember having to write my name transliterated into Chinese characters when I originally registered in Maomng back in 2012. Now that I’m in Beijing, the form is in Chinese and English, but my name is only in English.
They didn’t care. I have a common first name, but my wife doesn’t like it. It turns out that my middle name can be approximated by two characters in Chinese, both of which are commonly used as name
We actually got married in Japan as were were both residents. Japan required me use my English name and for her to use her Chinese name.
We ran into it what we were registering the marriage for Taiwan.
I have loads of experience being with Chinese speakers, I just don’t actually speak Chinese. This is the breakdown of my Masters course that I’ve been doing full time for the past two years - about 40% Chinese-speaking Chinese (mostly PRC), 30% Indians, 20% other-international, 10% native English speaker. Majority of my tutors - also Chinese speakers.
In any case, that post was focussed on written language. Worrying about what character to use obviously doesn’t apply when you’re speaking out loud. I can’t say I’ve heard my classmates speak anyone’s name much in one on one Chinese conversation but mostly we’re talking about our coursework, not each other (also, the University kind of subtly leans away from encouraging English names - you can’t get it as an email address, for instance)