Lor Mou Nay

November 6, 2012 5:32 AM

Who were the people first responsible for the direct translation of the name 羅姆尼 (Romney) in Cantonese? How did they decide which words to use for the sound?

 
Since there is no "R" sound in the Cantonese dialect, wouldn't it be a closer sound to use a "W", 禾 (wor) instead of the "L" sounding, 羅 (lor)?
 

posted by querty to Writing & Language (5 answers total)

Occasionally it may happen organically (e.g. a clever coinage), but this is actually a fairly complex process of localization, marketing, and "branding" essentially. Using characters in Mandarin Chinese, there are many equally valid ways to phonetically transliterate/translate a proper noun, such as a company like Coca-Cola or a politician's name. Sometimes it's purely an arbitrary phonetic approximation of the source sound, but usually it's semantically-informed as well, and there are delicate connotations to keep in balance, which aids in the decision between the equally valid phonetic candidates. So, originally Coca-Cola chose characters with unfavorable shades of meaning, eventually they rebranded themselves and settled on a truly brilliant transliteration: 可口可乐 (ke kou ke le), which means literally, "Can Mouth Can Happy".

For more, see here. And here.

Incidentally, this is also related to the phenomenon of Chinese internet users, or "netizens", skirting the notorious Great Firewall of China. The most famous case of this is probably the Grass Mud Horse, which uses different characters to approximate the phonetic sound of a taboo profanity.

As for how Western politicians get their transliterations, it's a good question, and I can't find much after a few Google searches. But I would bet that it's done by the official party-sanctioned news agency. And, again, I would assume that these officials charged with the character "branding" of the politicians are taking connotation into careful consideration. For what it's worth, Obama's name, 奥巴马, means literally "mysterious/profound hope/desire horse/surname". How diplomatic and flattering.
posted by stroke_count at 6:39 AM on November 6, 2012 [2 favorites]

It may be some kind of standardisation between news agencies, over time. I remember once seeing names transliterated differently over time. Once, when I was in primary school, there was a national directive that changed the way the names of the states (in Malaysia) were transliterated in Chinese. Something behind the scenes like that may be happening. I may remember wrongly, but my teacher then said something about how there are just conventions about which words to use, like 罗 instead of 骆 or something, even though they sound the same, phonetically.

That doesn't really answer your question, right? Well, speaking as a sample size of one native Mandarin and Cantonese speaker, 'ro' to 'luo' or 'loh' is totally intuitive. It's just how things are done? (It's kind of a long-standing joke in my family that Chinese have problems with properly enunciating r's in Chinese, and they come out as l's instead.)

Specifically in the case of 'wor' versus 'loh' you're citing, 'loh' seems a better choice - 'wor' (禾) is he2 in Mandarin, which doesn't approximately preserve the sound across dialects. 罗姆尼 makes total sense in both Mandarin and Cantonese, but maybe that's coincidence.

This is a super interesting question, sorry if my answer misses the mark. Hopefully someone will come in with authoritative info on this.
posted by undue influence at 7:39 AM on November 6, 2012

"米特 羅姆尼" is the transliteration that is being used on Chinese-language ballots in jurisdictions where it is required by the Voting Rights Act (such as New York City, or Boston). Interestingly, Obama has elected to stick with "歐巴瑪" and not transliterate "Barack". Example.

Careful character selection is practically a must in that context so that the sound is preserved in both Cantonese and Mandarin, the two biggest dialects among the Chinese immigrant population.

羅姆尼 - Cantonese lou mo nei, Mandarin luo mu ni. May in fact work in the less common Fujian & Taiwanese dialects.
posted by Hollywood Upstairs Medical College at 8:50 AM on November 6, 2012

The transcription template shows that all "r" sounds in English are translated into "l" words in Chinese. I don't know why, but as a native speaker, it's entirely intuitive to me. Even though there are in fact "r" sounds in Chinese!

There's no one central authority deciding on the transliteration, and there usually are multiple variations across China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Xinhua News Agency (China) has a broad reach though, so their decision is the one that usually sticks. Xinhua even publishes a handbook of transliterated names, which I'd imagine would be useful to any news editor as reference.

This article talks a little bit more about the regional variations, like how transliterations in China take care to make the person seem foreign (by using words that are never used in names), whereas Taiwan and Hong Kong transliterations often adopt words that are plausibly Chinese surnames. Incidentally, the article opens with a description of the little kerfuffle in 2009 over whether Obama should be 奥巴马 (ao-ba-ma) or 欧巴马 (ou-ba-ma).
posted by hellopanda at 9:37 AM on November 6, 2012

It might also interest you to know that transliteration into Chinese characters runs in deep historical grooves. The transliteration for the Sanskrit word dhāraṇī is 陀羅尼 (and has been for over a thousand years). 姆 is not uncommonly used for an "m" sound at the end of a syllable in more recent transliterations, like 哈姆雷特 (Hamlet) and 朗姆 (rum). Of course none of this is set in stone, but it does represent a "toolkit of defaults", especially for potentially ambiguous cases like how to deal with sounds that aren't in Chinese at all like that initial "r".

How any individual Chinese person pronounces 羅 is far less important than the fact that it is a "standard" way of representing an "r" sound (followed by a certain kind of vowel) in the source language.
posted by No-sword at 4:52 PM on November 6, 2012