How an English name becomes a Chinese name — without sounding machine-made

Three routes to a Chinese name

Pure transliteration (音译) picks characters for syllables and nothing else — what news wires use for foreign politicians. Sound-and-meaning (音意兼译) picks characters that match the syllables and say something: 可口可乐, “tasty and joyful”, is Coca-Cola’s name by this method. Full adoption drops the sound entirely and takes whatever name the culture would give a person.

Most people land on sound-and-meaning: your name still rings familiar when a Chinese speaker reads it aloud, while every character says something deliberate.

The rules a real name follows

One genuine single-syllable surname first (from the hundred-family names, 百家姓), then one or two characters as the given name — two or three characters in total. The given name should mean something as a pair, not a syllable salad. The tones should vary; a run of identical tones stumbles on the tongue. And read aloud, the whole name must not land on an unfortunate homophone — a test any native speaker passes you or fails you on in one second.

Names destined for a seal add one old rule: a three-character name was classically padded to four with an ancient filler (之印, 之 or 印) so the square grid of the seal face fills evenly.

Why this matters on a seal

A seal is the one place your name is rendered as calligraphy and knife-work. A syllable-salad transliteration reads — instantly, to anyone who can read — as a tourist trinket; a curated name reads as a name. The library on this site pairs each English name with a Chinese name built by these rules, explains every character, and carves the result in authentic seal script.