Who is Luobote?

Last time I wrote about confusion caused by Chinese names to western person. However, I can assure that there is no difficulty to "return the favour" by raising confusion with western names in China. I could create much amusement in West-China countryside by pronouncing my full name "Robert Johannes Brotherus" and showing it in written form to my fellow travellers. 很长! (Hěn zhǎng, "So long!") was the common opinion.

Of course Chinese characters are both characters and words at the same time, so there are exactly three words in both my name and a typical Chinese name. But just in terms of sheer length taken by these words there is no denying that Chinese names - like Chinese writing in general - are very compact compared to western names. In our boarding passes from an internal flight in China you can see my name overflowing the intended space whereas Jinlins name (陈妍洁) is fully printed in quarter of the space available:

When we were ordering tickets for our group travel in a small local travel agency in Kunmin, the employees were inspecting my passport for long time and discussing with Jinlin how to interpret the different incomprehensible fields in it. 

I was trying to participate in the discussion with my clumsy Chinese by repeating "Wǒ de míngzì shì Robert Johannes Brotherus" (my name is Robert Johannes Brotherus) and "Wǒ de Xìng shì Brotherus" (my surname is Brotherus). My explanations were not hugely successful, I should prehaps said "Wǒ de míngzì shì Brotherus Robert Johannes" to fit the Chinese way.

Western names, Chinese way

When Chinese names are written in English, they are written as English characters that together resemble the sounds of pronouncing the name. So for example 陈妍洁 is written as "Chen Yanjie" because this resembles the spoken sounds of 陈妍洁. Going the other way round is more tricky. Taking some random English or Finnish name - without any particular meaning - and writing it using only Chinese characters is called transliterating. The problem is that Chinese characters primarily code meaning whereas names like "Robert" do not have any intrinsic meaning. It is possible to find Chinese characters whose sounds approximately match the sounds in the foreign word. But there are many slightly imperfect matches using different Chinese characters. For example "Robert" could in principle be written in dozens of different forms, such as: 

囖比尔特    (Lo bǐ'ěr tè)
如波尔塔  (Rú bō ěr tǎ)

如喔波尔塔  (Rú ō bō ěr tǎ)

日噢贝尔托  (Rì ō bèi'ěr tuō)

Which of these and other possible approximations should be the "correct" transliteration of the name? In China the problem has been solved by simply officially deciding for each foreign name a standard set of similarly sounding Chinese characters. There is complete science trying to determine optimal transliteration of names, as exemplified by research paper "English-Chinese Name Transliteration with Bi-Directional Syllable-Based Maximum Matching". Standard transliterations exist in dictionaries for example for names of major places like Finland (芬兰,  Fēnlán) and Helsinki (赫尔辛基, Hè'ěrxīnjī). For many smaller ones like "Kainuu" standard forms do not exist, so they must be left in English form or transliterated ad hoc with just any characters. 

For person names, standard transliterations have been developed for all common names. Hence "Robert" is not any of the forms above but:

You can listen how this sounds with Google Translate. Of course all Chinese characters also have some meaning. Some of the many meanings of these characters are:

罗 (Luō):  talkative, silk, catch birds with a net

伯 (Bó):   senior, paternal elder uncle

特 (Tè):   special, exceptional

So in China I am "Luobote": the exceptional talkative senior guy. Well, I have no problem with that description :D

My last name "Brotherus" is rare enough to not have any standard transliteration so "Robert Brotherus" translates simply to "罗伯特 Brotherus". And "Brotherus" unfortunately contains the strong Finnish "r" sound that requires slow up-down vibration of the tongue in mouth (Google translate can speak surprisingly very well the correct form). This proved to be nearly impossible for  Chinese people to pronounce and after two weeks of futile attempts by Jinlin I said she can just say "L" instead and we worry about the "r" later :-)

Going all the way: Getting a Chinese name

Just like Chinese people studying English often choose an English name for themselves, it is sometimes recommended that western people studing Chinese pick a proper three-character Chinese name for themselves. This is less common but still an interesting possibility.

There is a nice website that creates such a Chinese name for you based on your English name, and "desired essence of the name". Latter helps to pick characters of specific positive meaning from the multiple similar sounding ones. I tried the app and got a Chinese name 白 锐彬 (Bái Ruì Bin). You can see that there is some correlation with the sounds of my English name. The meanings are about positive characteristics of the mind: 白 (white, pure, bright), 锐 (sharp, keen) and 彬 (refined). Possibilities to praise yourself and your babies are endless ;-)