How do you say Django in Chinese? Could someone post the characters?
OK, one bump. Anybody?
Unfortunately, when transliterating into Chinese, there’s no exact way to “say” something. Chinese doesn’t have a standard transliteration method to take words from other languages.
Basically, the problem is that there’s no alphabet of independent phonemes that can be arbitrarily combined. To transliterate something, you have to choose some existing chinese words and put them together to kind of get the effect you want.
As for choosing the words, there’s good news and bad news:
Good News: Chinese words are all short, basically 1 syllable each. So you can work with small chunks which makes it easier to construct the sounds you want.
Bad News: There’s a pretty small phonetic range of the words. For instance, words can basically only end in a vowel, or “n” or “ng”. This means you usually need more words than one might expect.
Bad News: The fact that you have to pick from existing words means that you will inevitably end up with a meaning, not just a transliteration.
Good News: Due to the limited phonetic range, there are many homonyms (or near-homonyms that can serve just as well). So you generally have a wide berth for choosing which specific characters you’ll use (and thus the meaning it will carry).
The Chinese put a lot of importance on the meanings associated with a name (which I presume is what you’re wishing to transliterate). So the choice of characters is best left up to a native speaker (preferably someone who likes you :-).
There are some semi-standard ways to represent common Western names in Chinese (Tom = TangMu). But I doubt anything has been established for Django.
Personally, when picking a representation for my name in Chinese, I got help from a friend, and didn’t use the standard transliteration (which ends up sounding a lot like the Chinese word for “carrot”). It has the general phonetic “ring” of my Western name but a nice meaning when turned into Chinese characters.
Oh, and I should also note that there’s not just one “Chinese” language. Probably, you will want to pick characters that match the sounds when pronounced in Mandarin, since it’s the official dialect. But the same characters will sound completely different when pronounced by a speaker of Cantonese, or any number of other dialects across the country. Cantonese will be prevalent if you’re travelling to Hong Kong, for instance.
I don’t have the answer, but it’s always good to see that somebody remembers Django Reinhardt, the gypsy jazz guitarist with the fire-scarred hands.
In Cantonese there is a syllable approximating “Djang” - usually transliterated as “Chang”, and one for “Go”.
On this site, I find several Chinese characters for “Chang” (or “Jang”) in Cantonese, meaning variously, cooking pot or floor, but also “things past”; and “Go”, with many meanings, including “song”.
Use the Cantonese search yourself for those two syllables, and make up your own mind, but “past song” seems kind of appropriate.
While that’s true if you’re coming up with characters for your own name, Django Reinhardt happens to be someone famous, so someone has already chosen characters for that name. If you want people to know who you’re talking about, it’s a good idea to stick to those.
Anyway, searching a bit, the common transliteration of Reinhardt’s name seems to be:
强哥·莱æ©å“ˆç‰¹
Pronounced: Jiang gÄ“ Lái Ä“n hÄ tè (First character should have an ascending tone.)
The characters mean:
Strong - elder brother - weed/vegetable - favour - ha!(exclamation) - special
As you can see, it doesn’t mean much, but a nonsensical series of characters is a sign that you’re dealing with a phonetic transliteration.
Sometimes I don’t include enough information. Sorry about that.
I speak enough Mandarin Chinese to understand about the characters and syllables. We are naming our new (Chinese) daughter Django. I would like to have her name in characters so that we can tell the folks at the orphanage, etc., what we’re naming her when we get there (HeFei City) to bring her home.
I was assuming that Django’s name had already been translated, and was hoping for someone to pick up a Chinese issue of a CD and tell me what that was, which it appears jovan has done. Unfortunately, I’m not getting the characters on this PC. Are these correct?
Here’s her current Chinese name, YueBin.
Yes. I think you need to set the page encoding to UTF-8 for the characters to show up properly.