| Tattoos of Chinese symbols |
Question:
I have been searching the web for three days trying to get pictures of
symbols and/or writings because I a want to get another tattoo of my
name in chinese. Can anyone help me? Any input would be appreciated!
Answer:
- That's basically true, but of course the words do have sounds; and when
there's a need to transliterate a foreign word into Chinese, the usual
routine is to find a series of characters whose pronunciations approximate
the foreign word. Since there are usually several alternatives, one wants
to pick characters whose meaning (when they're read as words) is reasonable
or at least not ridiculous.
The famous "Coca-Cola/bite the wax tadpole" business is a good example;
see
for exhaustive detail. Coke settled on a transliteration that's pronounced
roughly "k'o k'ou k'o ler" which, read literally, means something like
"to permit the mouth to rejoice", but a more simpleminded transliteration
would have left them with a phrase that meant "bite the wax tadpole". Such
are the hazards of transliteration.
Thus you can get your name *transliterated* into Chinese, but you'll get
a Chinese phrase that sounds vaguely like your name, and it could *mean*
just about anything. If you don't mind having "my hovercraft is full of
eels" in Chinese tattooed on your ankle, then that's not a problem...
An alternative might be to find out the original meaning of your name (as,
for instance, "Nathan" is derived from a Semitic root meaning "gift") and
look for a Chinese name with similar semantics. I think this is the
obvious way to translate one's name, but everybody else seems to think I'm
weird.
- Just make something up and tell people it says your name, it will be just as
accurate most of the time.
- It's my understanding that names don't translate into characters. It's not
like they make a mark here for this sound or whatever, its a unique
character for each word, or at least that's what I picked up working for two
guys from mainland china for a year and a half. If you give me yer name I
can ask them more specifically, because there's no way in hell I'm gonna ask
em to show me "poochie108" in chinese.
- Actually I was reffering to most Kanji being done by artists that do not
themselves read the script. As such they miss much of the intricasy involved,
such as brush stroke direction. As for the one symbol one word idea very close
close. There are multiple sets of Kanji used, both phonetic and symbolic. It is
possible to make a phonetic spelling of a word, however there may be three or
four alternate "spellings" as well. This is why I dropped Japanese in college.
It is supposed to be the simplified version,
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