Transcription of "Barack Obama", "Hillary Clinton", and "Donald Trump" in the Sinosphere
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How do you write Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump's names in Chinese?
As it turns out, the answer may vary depending on whether the person you ask is from mainland China (ZH-CN), Hong Kong (ZH-HK), Macau (ZH-MO), Malaysia/Singapore (ZH-SG), or Taiwan (ZH-TW).
According to Wikipedia, the following are the preferred (or most widely used) transcriptions for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in each of these countries/regions (all pronunciations in MSM):
Barack Obama:
ZH-CN Bèilākè Àobāmǎ 贝拉克·奥巴马
ZH-HK Bālākè Àobāmǎ 巴拉克·奧巴馬
ZH-MO Bālākè Àobāmǎ 巴拉克·奧巴馬
ZH-SG Bèilākè Àobāmǎ 贝拉克·奥巴马
ZH-TW Bālākè Ōubāmǎ 巴拉克·歐巴馬
Hillary Clinton:
ZH-CN Xīlālǐ Kèlíndùn 希拉里·克林顿
ZH-HK Xīlālì Kèlíndùn 希拉莉·克林頓
ZH-MO Xīlālǐ Kèlíndùn 希拉里·克林頓
ZH-SG Xīlālì Kèlíndùn 希拉莉·克林顿
ZH-TW Xīlāruǐ Kēlíndùn 希拉蕊·柯林頓
Donald Trump:
ZH-CN Tángnàdé Tèlǎngpǔ 唐纳德·特朗普
ZH-HK Dāngláo Chuānpǔ 當勞·川普
ZH-MO Dāngláo Tèlǎngpǔ 當勞·特朗普
ZH-SG Tángnàdé Chuānpǔ 唐纳德·川普
ZH-TW Tángnà Chuānpǔ 唐納·川普
Cf. "Homa Obama" (9/22/14) and "Sea-watcher" (9/6/15),
[Thanks to Matthew Trueman]
Jenny Chu said,
October 2, 2016 @ 9:45 pm
Since most Chinese names have only 3 characters, of course, foreign names of sufficiently famous people get shortened. I've been wondering: on what basis do they get shortened?
Watching the news in Hong Kong, I certainly have never heard the full name 希拉莉·克林頓 … just "希拉莉" by itself. Likewise, Obama gets three characters, 奧巴馬. Meanwhile, Trump, apparently having started with four characters, ends up as 特朗普.
To what extent does it follow / parallel the usage in English?
1. Hillary Clinton calls herself Hillary in English, presumably partially because she's female and women don't use last names the same way guys do, but also presumably to distinguish herself from Bill Clinton – compare other female leaders: Nobody called Thatcher "Margaret" the way HRC calls herself "Hillary", but she didn't have to be compared to any previous Thatcher. So what was Thatcher's Chinese name? Does Merkel's Chinese name sound more like Angela or more like Merkel? Park (Korea) presumably has a "Chinese style" name that's sufficiently easy to transliterate.
2. Obama never campaigned as Barack – also, his 3-word Chinese name rolls off the tongue easily.
3. Trump sometimes calls himself "The Donald", but then again he uses his family name prominently as his brand – and he does (or did at one point) indeed have to distinguish himself from his father. How exactly did he end up with 特朗普?
Apollo Wu said,
October 2, 2016 @ 9:49 pm
Transliteration into Chinese is like creating 3 or more keys to replace the original key, there by creating confusion and inconvenience in accessing information linked with the original key. However, although even students in Chinese grade school can pronounce the name Obama, but the Chinese language meme insists on Sinicizing it with Chinese characters. Thus, with more than 150 years of British influence behind it, Hongkong Chinese media still insists on using the Sinicized name of 奥巴马。 To accept the original names as the more useful keys would be a difficult proposition indeed.
Jenny Chu said,
October 2, 2016 @ 10:02 pm
@Apollo Wu, I don't take it as anything more than a convenience for the tongue. I am a native English speaker and perfectly capable of pronouncing Hilary Clinton. I'm also a rather indifferent Cantonese speaker. But when I am speaking Cantonese and want to talk about her, I still say 希拉莉 so as not to stumble while switching modes.
hanmeng said,
October 2, 2016 @ 10:21 pm
I wonder if it was a conscious decision not to transliterate Donald as 唐老 (Táng lǎo)–another famous Donald. Donald Duck, that is. 唐老鴨 (Táng lǎo yā).
I am also much taken for the way in which the initial of Chuān- sounds to me to come closer to the original surname than Tèlǎng-.
mondain said,
October 2, 2016 @ 10:26 pm
'Trump' is also transcribed as 杜林普, which sounds closer to his ancestral name 'Drumpf'.
Wentao said,
October 3, 2016 @ 12:46 am
I think HRC is usually referred to simply as 希拉里/希拉莉/希拉蕊 in order to distinguish her from her husband. As it happens, the last names of US presidents appear much more often in Chinese. Media usually refer to the president as 美国总统XXX, where XXX is the last name only. Hence Bill Clinton is almost always 克林顿 Ke4lin2dun4, and I wouldn't be surprised if there are many people in China who don't know that his first name is 比尔 bi3er3. Therefore it would be confusing if Hillary's name is shortened to 克林顿 too.
The reason why Trump ends up being 特朗普 is that translators in the Mainland generally follow the Xinhua-approved 英汉译音表 "Transliteration Table from English to Chinese" very faithfully (to the extent of being pedantic). The table indicates that "tr/dr-" should be treated as "t/d + r-", hence the somewhat clumsy extra syllables. But 川普 still catches on, especially on the Internet, despite the occasional confusion caused by another meaning of the word 川味普通话, "speaking Mandarin with a Sichuan accent".
Also, some derogatory nicknames for this year's presidential candidates on internet: 床破 (chuang2po4, "bed-broken"), 希婆 (po2 = "old woman, crone"), 三德子 for Sanders (san1de2zi, Qing dynasty eunuch in a popular TV show), 软炮 for Rand Paul (ruan3pao4, "soft-cannon"). Marco Rubio is sometimes 小马哥 ("little-elder-brother Ma3"), which is more endearing.
John said,
October 3, 2016 @ 1:16 am
For what it's worth, one of Taiwan's four major daily newspapers just announced that they will start referring to Hillary Clinton as 柯林頓 instead of 希拉蕊. No word on whether her husband will start being called 比爾.
Here's the announcement: http://udn.com/news/story/7994/1986372
Keith said,
October 3, 2016 @ 2:34 am
Is there any reason that Zhuyin symbols could not be used for this purpose?
Can't we write "Obama" as "ㄛㄅˊㄚˊㄇㄚˋ"?
Matthew T. said,
October 3, 2016 @ 6:15 pm
Here's one more… Oprah Winfrey:
【ZH-CN, ZH-SG】Àopǔlā Wēnfúlǐ（奥普拉·温弗里）
【ZH-HK, ZH-MO】Àohuā Yúnfèi（奧花·雲費）
【ZH-TW】Ōupǔlā Wēnfúlěi（歐普拉·溫芙蕾）
.
Eidolon said,
October 3, 2016 @ 8:44 pm
"Transliteration into Chinese is like creating 3 or more keys to replace the original key, there by creating confusion and inconvenience in accessing information linked with the original key. However, although even students in Chinese grade school can pronounce the name Obama, but the Chinese language meme insists on Sinicizing it with Chinese characters. Thus, with more than 150 years of British influence behind it, Hongkong Chinese media still insists on using the Sinicized name of 奥巴马。 To accept the original names as the more useful keys would be a difficult proposition indeed."
While the case of Hong Kong is probably political, it would be incorrect to assume that, just because English and pinyin are both written using the Roman alphabet, any pinyin user would therefore be able to accurately reconstruct English pronunciations using a pinyin transliteration.
A name such as Hillary can be written in pinyin, but I doubt it could be pronounced by the average Mandarin speaker, because the sounds that form it are "alien" to the way phonemes are typically rendered in pinyin. They could probably make a guess at the pronunciation through applying their knowledge of pinyinized Mandarin, but it'd be an inaccurate transliteration, because certain syllables within the name simply do not exist in Mandarin and so they've never learned how to say them. And were they to approximate it with syllables that do exist in Mandarin, then it'd be no different than using Chinese characters, and would lead to a similar result.
Andrew said,
October 4, 2016 @ 12:06 pm
Is there any reason that Zhuyin symbols could not be used for this purpose?
There's no technical reason, but the convention of transliterating foreign (non-Japanese, non-Korean and I suppose non-Vietnamese) names using Chinese characters is very established and the use of Zhuyin would be seen as bizarre.
It helps somewhat that there are some characters that are frequently used for these transliterations and don't otherwise pop up much elsewhere, such as 爾 ěr and 斯 sī, that tend to signal to the reader that a foreign name is in play.
IME, Zhuyin is used in adult texts (vs. texts for children or language learners) in Taiwan to represent syllables that are outside of standard Mandarin phonotactics (such as gíng ㄍㄧㄥˊ) or to represent syllables from Taiwanese Hokkien that have no standard hanzi writing convention. It's not used as katakana in Japanese to represent foreign names.
J.W. Brewer said,
October 4, 2016 @ 12:50 pm
To follow up on Keith and Andrew's comments, just because it recently came up in a different context in a comment thread elsewhere: I certainly understand that bopomofo is not, in fact, typically used for transliteration purposes in the way katakana is used in Japanese despite seeming to be structurally very well-suited for that purpose. But why not? Was the concept raised at some earlier point in time but rejected (and if so why) or simply never seriously proposed despite its seeming obviousness? I know that at this point several generations of Communist rule have made bopomofo literacy uncommon on the mainland so it might be odd to advocate at this late date for an innovation that would be inaccessible to most people literate in Mandarin, but if the various newspapers on Taiwan some decades ago when the political situation was different had seriously considered adopting that approach I hardly think being out of step with mainland practice would have been a reason not to do it back then. I can understand a certain degree of nationalistic pride affecting the psychology of the situation and making the literary-elite classes reluctant to overtly borrow from Japanese practice even when the Japanese innovation was useful, but were there other factors at play?
David Marjanović said,
October 4, 2016 @ 7:23 pm
Endearing? Are you sure? It reminds me immediately of Trump calling him Little Marco.
The sheer weight of tradition? "Never change a system that's still moving at all"?
Wentao said,
October 4, 2016 @ 8:17 pm
@David Marjanović
It is very common to call people 小X, which, although indicating juniority, doesn't carry a negative connotation like Trump's use of "little". 小哥 is also a generic word for a young-ish man, probably like English "lad". And most people who use the name to refer to Rubio are, as far as I know, in fact Republican-sympathizers, so I'm fairly certain it's not meant as an insult.
Rachel said,
October 6, 2016 @ 12:25 am
Additional evidence about the 小X: George W. Bush is usually called 小布希 in Taiwan.
Trump is, so far as I've heard in Taiwan, always just called 川普, although it sometimes sounds like the first syllable is fourth tone rather than first.
Victor Mair said,
October 8, 2016 @ 4:11 pm
From Jichang Lulu:
Transcribing candidate names into the Tibetan script should be more straightforward, but inspection of a few PRC and non-PRC sources reveals even more variety than in the Chinese case. Looking just at 'Trump':
ཊི་རུམ་ཕི་ Ti rum phi (Tibet Times བོད་ཀྱི་དུས་བབ bod kyi dus bab, Dharamsala): uses the consonant ཊ (often transliterated as a capital T) that occurs only in loanwords (originally Sanskrit, now also Western). That consonant is usually pronounced as a plain retroflex affricate [ʈʂ] in Lhasa, but can be just a stop [ʈ] elsewhere in Central Tibetan, and, I'm told, also in Dharamsala. That could be one reason why an r is still present after the T. The Trump vowel is u [ʊ]. Overall effect: Drumpf-ish.
ཐི་རུམ་ཕུ་ thi rum phu (people.com.cn མི་དམངས་དྲ་བ་ mi dmangs dra ba 人民网 Rénmín wǎng): vowel still u, aspirated initial plus r.
ཁྲོང་ཕུ་ khrong phu (Khabdha ཁ་བརྡ་ kha brda): initial khr-, pronounced as a aspirate retroflex affricate [ʈʂʰ] much like pinyin ch- (which it is indeed used to transliterate). So the strategy here is to transcribe English Tr- as an affricate, just like in Chinese 川普. The vowel is still rounded. Alternative translations in the comments include ཊོམ་ Tom, which isn't that far off if you affricate the T.
ཁྲོན་ཕུ་ khron phu (The Tibet Post བོད་ཀྱི་ཆ་འཕྲིན་ bod kyi cha 'phrin, Dharamsala): just like Khabdha, only a different nasal in the first syllable which might (or might not) front the vowel. Although this comes from a non-PRC source, the transcription is the most Chinese, as it would be the expected Tibetanisation of 川普.
That's five Tibetan forms of the surname Trump, against three in Chinese if I'm counting right. 'Donald' is also rendered in several different ways.
The default expectation should be transliteration diversity in exile sources and standardisation in PRC media, but turning to 'Hillary' we find for example:
ཧི་ལ་རེ་ hi la re (people.com.cn) from the English, but
ཞི་ལཱ་ལི་ zhi lA li (shangri-latibet.com 香格里拉藏文网 Xiānggélǐlā zàngwén wǎng, an online emanation of the Diqing Daily 迪庆日报 Díqìng rìbào's Tibetan edition བདེ་ཆེན་བོད་ཡིག་་ཚགས་པར་ bde chen bod yig tshags par), clearly from Chinese.