Where's your explanation? ๐ข
this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2026
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Before the modern era, many cultures chose to translate foreign names into more 'familiar' forms - such as the Roman Marcus Antonius being transliterated into English as Mark Antony, or the Arabic scholar Ibn Sina being Latinized by medieval Catholics into Avicenna. Or, for medieval Euros doing it to each other, Charlemagne being also known as Karl der Groรe and Carolus Magnus.
Here, some old Chinese translations of Western names are shown, and it's pretty neat. Clockwise from the top-left:
George Washington (Hua Shengdun)
Neville Chamberlain (Zhang Bolun)
Erwin Schrodinger (Xue Ding'e)
Charlie Chaplin (Zhuo Bielin)
Do those "local" names sound in a similar way as originals or there was some other logic behind these renames?
They sound somewhat similar to the originals (say 'Hua Shengdun' quickly, and then 'Washington'), while also making it clear that it's a name and not just a collection of gibberish from a typo or the like. It may also have been easier to write with Chinese characters.
In the modern day, we're more understanding of the fact that language families can sound radically different from one another.
I want to add that even today, it's the convention to refer to foreign names using the closest sounding Chinese characters. ่ฏ็้ is simply how George Washington would be referred to in Chinese today. Which character is used can also vary depending on the dialect/language used because it is pronunciation based, and the different dialect/language are pronounced differently (duh).
Trump, for example, is ็นๆๆฎ dak6 long5 pou2 in Cantonese and ๅทๆฎ Chuฤn pว in Mandarin. Biden is the same for both, ๆ็ป baai3 dang1 in Cantonese and Bร i dฤng in Mandarin.
baai3 dang1
(goodbye darn)
It took several tries, but I understand now. Those Chinese names sound roughly like the last name of the person.
Was just watching Digimon 2020 and realized how much the show anglicized the names of all the kids.
Taichi became Tai.
Hikari became Kari.
Yamato became Matt.
Izumi became Izzy.
Sora became Sara.
Same vibes
dude use some punctuation, people usually have two names
I had no idea what you were talking about until I opened this outside of connect. Apparently my line break formatting got eaten.
either put two spaces before newline or two newlines.
I mean, sure, I can bend over to get piefed to display my comment in the way I wrote it but it's kind of crazy that it isn't respecting new lines in the first place, no? Like, why is that a thing?
It might be a markdown thing
There was a bunch of chinese names translated into engrish after an air disaster once...
I can smell Sum Ting Wong
White cocksucka!! Swejin! Swejin!