Good Characters, Inc. Blog

If your last name was Palms or Butz, would you name your child Harry? If your name was Bochs, would you call your daughter Candy? I know a woman named Ima who married a man with the last name Davenport. The images that a name conjures up in the hearer’s mind—the meanings attached to the words—make an impression for good or ill.

This is true in Chinese as well as in English. Take, for example, a taxi driver named Wu An-Quan. An-Quan means safety. Good name for a taxi driver, right? Actually, not when combined with the surname Wu, which sounds identical to another character that means “no.” When people hear Wu An-Quan, they think “not safe.” Or consider Duan Zhen, a school nurse. Zhen means highly valuable. But Duan Zhen together sounds exactly like a phrase with different characters: Duan, broken, and Zhen, needle. Who wants to go to a nurse who breaks the needle when giving an injection?

This is why translating or transliterating names in different languages must be done so carefully. A perfectly good name in one language can be translated to a name with very negative connotations in another. This article — It’s Important to Carefully Select a Name that Doesn’t Have Negative Connotations (in Chinese) — gives 21 actual examples of personal name blunders in the Chinese language. This article — Good Meanings Alone Are Not Enough
– illustrates that simply combining characters with positive meanings does not always result in a Chinese name with positive connotations.

Links:

• It’s important to carefully select a name that doesn’t have negative connotations (Chinese)
  起名千万要慎重
• Good Meanings Alone Are Not Enough