How Foreign Words Become Chinese

A foreign word enters Chinese by being rewritten one syllable at a time. Each syllable is written with a character taken from a small pool of characters used for their sound. Each of those characters already has a meaning and a tone, and both stay attached to it in the new word. The sound of the foreign word fixes which syllables are needed. The only decision left to the translator is which character writes each syllable.

The features of Chinese loanwords that people find strange all follow from that one decision: the extra syllables, the pitch pattern the original word did not have, and the different spellings of the same city in Taipei and Beijing.

Core takeaways

• Chinese takes in foreign names in two ways. 音譯 rewrites the sound with characters that mean nothing as a string. 意譯 translates the meaning. A third way, 音義兼譯, does both, and it is rare because it needs a string of characters that fits the sound and also has a good meaning.
• The characters used for sound come from a small, nearly fixed pool. A final -l or -r is written 爾, an /s/ is written 斯 or 絲, a final /k/ is written 克.
• The mainland has one office, 新華社譯名室, and published tables that fix one character per sound. Taiwan has reference books and no compulsory standard. That is why Obama is 歐巴馬 in Taiwan and 奧巴馬 on the mainland.
• There is no rule that transliterations take first tone. In a corpus built from 1,372 English loanwords, first tone was 28.8% of syllables, against 26.9% in general vocabulary. The tone of each syllable is the tone of the character chosen for it.
• The rewritten word is longer than the original, carries tones the original did not have, and has every sound rounded to a legal Mandarin syllable. An English speaker not recognizing 波拉勒斯 as Boralus is the normal result.
• The Coca-Cola name 可口可樂 developed out of Shanghai names such as 可口汽水 and 可口露 in the 1920s. The story of a £350 contest in The Times won by 蔣彝 is false, and 蝌蝌啃蠟 was never an official name.

Sound translation, meaning translation, and the rare mix of both

Chinese has two ways to take in a foreign name. 音譯 (sound translation) rewrites the sound. Kul Tiras becomes 庫爾提拉斯: four English syllables become five Chinese ones, and the five characters mean nothing as a string. 意譯 (meaning translation) drops the sound and translates the sense. Stormwind becomes 暴風城, storm-wind-city, and a Chinese speaker reads it as a description, not as a name. Blizzard’s Chinese localizations use both and split them by category. City names mostly get meaning translation (暴風城 Stormwind, 鐵爐堡 Ironforge). Race and region names mostly get sound translation (庫爾提拉斯, 贊達拉).

The third way, 音義兼譯 (sound-and-sense translation), does both at once: the characters approximate the sound and also read as something that fits the thing named. It is used mostly in branding, because it needs a string of characters that both sounds right and means something good, and such a string usually does not exist. Coca-Cola as 可口可樂 is the textbook case. Taiwan’s word for hacker, 駭客, is another: it sounds like the English word, and 駭 carries a sense of alarm. The mainland’s 黑客 (black-guest) matches only the sound. Sonar became 聲納, sound-take-in. UFO became 幽浮, ghostly-floating. Viagra became 威而剛, roughly power-and-firmness.

Two more examples appear constantly in translation teaching, and each comes with an origin story that has not been confirmed. The usual claim about Revlon’s 露華濃 is that it takes a line from Li Bai, 春風拂檻露華濃, which would make it both a sound fit and a literary allusion. No first-hand source for that origin story has been located. The usual claim about Carrefour’s 家樂福 is that the French name means “crossroads” and the Chinese was built to read “every household happy and blessed”. Taiwanese official and school material tells it that way. The Taiwan chain was renamed 萬家福 in June 2026 after 統一 took over, so in Taiwan the example is now historical.

The third way is rare because the needed coincidence is rarely found. Most of the time nobody finds a string of characters that fits both sound and meaning, the meaning is not used, and the word is written for sound only.

The characters used for sound

Characters used for sound are bleached: their meaning has faded through repeated use in this role until readers stop noticing it. The standard teaching example is 麥克風, microphone, which has nothing to do with 麥子 (wheat) or 風 (wind). A transliterated word means something only as a whole string. Taken apart it produces nonsense, and Chinese readers do not take it apart.

The pool is small, and the assignments are nearly fixed. A word-final -l or -r (the /l/ in Bill, the /r/ in beer) is written 爾. An /s/ is written 斯 or 絲. A final /k/ is written 克, /m/ is written 姆, /t/ is written 特, /d/ is written 德. Syllables that start with a vowel use 阿, 埃, 伊, 奧, 烏. The mainland’s tables add fixed rules on top: the letter s is written 斯 whether it is pronounced [s] or [z], which is why Jones is 瓊斯 and not 瓊茲. Cantonese uses a separate pool. Jack’s /k/ takes the entering-tone character 積, and Rose’s /s/ takes 士. That is why Hong Kong renderings can be identified as Hong Kong renderings on sight.

The usual explanation for why these characters and not others is that they are high-frequency, semantically empty, and together cover the syllable inventory. That is a reasonable account. No formal argument for it has been located, so it counts as folk consensus and not as a finding.

Who fixes the standard rendering on the mainland and in Taiwan

The mainland has a single office for this. 新華社譯名室, the Xinhua transliteration room, was founded on 24 July 1956 after an instruction from Zhou Enlai: 譯名要統一，要歸口於新華社, renderings must be unified, and they answer to Xinhua. It is the only official body on the mainland that approves Chinese renderings of foreign names. It works by two principles, stated in eight characters. 名從主人 means the name follows its owner: translate from the pronunciation in the person’s own language. 約定俗成 means an established rendering stays established, however wrong it looks now.

The reference works behind the office are large. 《英語姓名譯名手冊》 first appeared in 1965 and reached its fifth edition in 2018, with roughly 74,000 English-language names. 《世界人名翻譯大辭典》 came out in 1993 and was revised in 2007, with about 650,000 entries. Each source language has its own 譯音表, a syllable-to-character table with one character per sound. The tables for personal names and for place names differ slightly. Place names also have a national standard, GB/T 17693, covering English, French, German, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, Portuguese, Mongolian and (since 2019) Japanese. Its stated principle is sound translation first, with deference to established forms.

Taiwan has no compulsory standard. Publishers and public bodies issue reference wordbooks for anyone who wants them, and long usage settles the rest. The nearest thing to an authority is the 國家教育研究院 (formerly 國立編譯館). It publishes 《外國地名譯名》 (fourth edition 2014; the third edition carried 66,632 place names, each with English name, Chinese rendering and coordinates) and 《外國學者人名譯名》 (8,912 names across ten source languages). Both are posted publicly on 樂詞網. Its stated principle is the same 名從主人. The de facto press standard is 中央社, which compiled 《標準譯名錄》 in 1980 and later turned it into a database of roughly 122,000 entries. Media do not follow one source. Some outlets use CNA’s renderings, some invent their own, and the same outlet can print one person’s name two ways.

Neither the mainland arrangement nor the Taiwan arrangement is new. A 1924 Republican-era formulation already reads 即西文每一音素，均擇一發音相當之漢字，作為標準譯字: for each Western phoneme, pick one Chinese character of matching sound and make it the standard rendering character.

Names that differ between Taipei and Beijing

The difference shows on well-known names. Obama is 歐巴馬 in Taiwan and 奧巴馬 on the mainland and in Hong Kong. Trump is 川普 in Taiwan and 特朗普 on the mainland. Bush is 布希 in Taiwan and 布什 on the mainland (Hong Kong: 布殊), for both presidents. Reagan is 雷根 in Taiwan and 里根 on the mainland (Hong Kong: 列根). Kennedy is 甘迺迪 in Taiwan and Hong Kong and 肯尼迪 on the mainland. Clinton is 柯林頓 in Taiwan and 克林頓 on the mainland. Sydney is 雪梨 in Taiwan and Hong Kong and 悉尼 on the mainland. A mainland reader who meets 雪梨奧運會 in Hong Kong or Taiwanese news can fail to identify which Olympics is meant.

China Daily gives a structural explanation for the personal-name differences, and the explanation is not sourced further than that article. Taiwan kept a Republican-era habit of making the first character of a foreign personal name a real Chinese surname. That habit gives 甘迺迪, 雷根 and 柯林頓, and it uses rare surnames too: 胡笙 for Hussein, 佘契爾 for Thatcher. The mainland has no such convention and produces 肯尼迪, 里根, 克林頓, 侯賽因, 撒切爾.

The Obama case is the one time the difference was argued in public. In November 2009 the US embassy in Beijing announced that the US government’s standard Chinese rendering was 歐巴馬, on the grounds that it is closer to the English pronunciation. Xinhua did not change its rendering. Its reasons: Obama is a common Kenyan surname with an established rendering, 奧巴馬 had been in use for years, and head-of-state renderings are not changed lightly. By February 2015 the embassy’s own press releases had gone back to 奧巴馬. A local story says Taiwan avoids 奧 because in Taiwanese the character carries a sense of underhandedness, as in 奧步, a dirty trick. That story circulates in Hong Kong press with no documentation behind it and should be treated as folklore.

Where the tones come from

There is no flat-tone rule. Transliterations are not systematically first tone. The tone on a syllable is the tone the chosen character already had.

The numbers show this. Eleanor Glewwe’s 2015 UCLA master’s thesis built a corpus of 3,660 syllables drawn from 1,372 English loanwords in Mandarin. Baseline tone frequency across general Mandarin vocabulary is T1 26.9%, T2 24.7%, T3 18.3%, T4 30.1%. The commonest tone in general vocabulary is fourth tone. In her loanword subset (N=3,047) the figures are T1 28.8%, T2 29.5%, T3 16.0%, T4 25.7%. First tone in loanwords is therefore about two points above its baseline. That two-point difference is the whole of the “flat tone” effect, and it is close enough to noise that no rule can be built on it.

What did condition tone in her corpus was the voicing of the English consonant at the start of the syllable. Voiceless obstruents (p, t, k, s, f, the consonants made by blocking or squeezing airflow with the vocal cords switched off) took first tone 38.4% of the time (N=1,957). Sonorants (m, n, l, r, w, y, made with the vocal cords running throughout) took first tone 11.6% of the time and second tone 37.2% of the time (N=1,090). Glewwe’s explanation is F0 perturbation: a voiceless consonant raises the pitch of the vowel after it slightly, a voiced consonant lowers it slightly, and the person borrowing the word hears the raised pitch as high tone and the lowered pitch as rising tone.

Her experiment gave a different result from her corpus. Live speakers adapting invented words keyed on English stress instead: stressed syllables took first tone most often, word-final stressed syllables took fourth tone, and the voicing effect did not appear. Glewwe’s conclusion is that the two studies conflict and that tonal adaptation “depends on overall English intonation rather than small F0 perturbations.” The field has no settled phonological rule.

Zhuting Chang’s 2020 CUNY dissertation explains the data by not looking for a phonological rule at all. In Chang’s account, tone assignment operates “beyond any usual phonological concerns.” What adapters use is implicit knowledge of tone probability and character frequency in the existing lexicon, plus “seeking of appropriate characters based on their meanings, either to avoid unintended readings of loanwords or to form desired interpretations.” Chang credits the writing system itself, which earlier work in this literature had underrated: one character is one syllable, homophones are everywhere, and compounding is free. The adapter picks the character for its meaning, and the tone is whatever tone that character has.

One constraint limits the choice. Mandarin has tonotactic gaps: syllable-and-tone combinations that have no character. There is no dán. Loanword adaptation does not fill those gaps. Only combinations already in the native lexicon are available. So a share of the tones in any transliteration were never chosen at all: that syllable exists in one tone, and that is the tone the word gets.

Three examples show the range of tone shapes.

• 可口可樂 kě-kǒu-kě-lè, tones 3-3-3-4. The most famous transliteration in the language contains no first tone.
• 德魯伊 dé-lǔ-yī, tones 2-3-1. It contains a third tone, the rarest tone in the language.
• 波拉勒斯 bō-lā-lè-sī, tones 1-1-4-1. Three first tones out of four. This is the shape people have in mind when they say transliterations come out flat.

Three words, three different tone shapes, all three verified against 教育部重編國語辭典. A fourth case settles the question. Boralus is written differently on the two sides of the strait, and the difference moves the tone. Blizzard’s Taiwanese localization writes 波拉勒斯, starting on 波 (bō, first tone). The mainland writes 伯拉勒斯, starting on 伯 (bó, second tone). One English source word, two teams, a different first character, a different tone. If the tone were computed from the English, that could not happen.

One narrow sub-rule does hold. An earlier claim in the literature (Wu 2006) that inserted syllables beginning with /s/ take first tone holds in Glewwe’s corpus: of 251 first-tone inserted syllables, 195 are the single syllable sī. That syllable is 斯, the -s at the end of 波拉勒斯 and 庫爾提拉斯.

A note for anyone saying 可口可樂 out loud: 3-3-3-4 is the citation form, not the spoken one. Two third tones in a row turn the first into a rising tone, so 可口 is said ké-kǒu and the whole word is said ké-kǒu-kě-lè.

Why the original speaker does not recognize the word

Glewwe’s thesis starts from one fact: English words borrowed into Mandarin must be assigned tones. There is no toneless option. Mandarin has no un-toned syllables, so the borrowing process adds pitch information that was not in the source word.

Three changes then happen to the word, and a fourth runs alongside them.

The word gets longer. Mandarin does not allow consonant clusters, so English dr- cannot stay as one unit. It splits across two syllables, 德 + 魯, and two English syllables become three. Mandarin also allows only -n, -ng and -r at the end of a syllable. Every other final consonant is either dropped or given a syllable of its own. The final -s of Boralus becomes 斯, and three syllables become four. Glewwe’s term for the added syllables is epenthetic syllables. Her clearest case is lace arriving as lěisī: one English syllable, two Chinese ones.

The word gains tones. Every syllable now carries a pitch contour the original did not have, and those contours come from the characters, not from the English.

Every sound is rounded to the nearest legal Mandarin sound, because a syllable that does not exist in Mandarin cannot be written.

The fourth change, per Chang, is that the adapter is looking for characters whose meanings will not produce an unwanted reading, so the sounds are bent further to reach a character that reads acceptably. Where a tonotactic gap applies, there was no choice to make.

By the time Boralus comes out as 波拉勒斯 it is one syllable longer, it carries tones, every sound in it has been rounded, and at least one of its syllables was chosen for reasons unrelated to English. An English speaker not recognizing it is the expected outcome of these changes.

What the characters mean when read one at a time

Reading the characters one at a time shows how little meaning they carry. 德魯伊 is 德 (moral norm, virtue), 魯 (dull-witted, clumsy; also the ancient state of Lu, Confucius’s home), 伊 (a literary third-person pronoun, today used mostly as a transliteration syllable: 伊朗 Iran, 伊拉克 Iraq). Read literally it is virtue-dull-he. 德 is a high-prestige character and carries no meaning here. It is present because it sounds like d-, as it does in 德國 Germany and 德州 Texas. The English word means “oak-knower”, from Proto-Celtic *dru-wid-s, a reading Pliny the Elder endorsed. A meaning translation exists on record, 橡木賢者, oak sage. Nobody uses it.

波拉勒斯 reads the same way: 波 (wave), 拉 (to pull, drag), 勒 (a bridle or bit), 斯 (to split; as a literary word, “this”). Wave-pull-bridle-this. That 波 lands on a harbour city is coincidence. 波 is the default character for foreign bo-/po- syllables, as in 波士頓 Boston, 波蘭 Poland, 波音 Boeing.

Where 德魯伊 came from

Blizzard did not coin 德魯伊. A druid is a priest of the pre-Christian Celtic religion, and the older Chinese rendering is 督伊德 (dū-yī-dé, tones 1-1-2, the same source word with a different tone shape). The word was in games before World of Warcraft. Diablo II: Lord of Destruction added the Druid class on 29 June 2001, and the Taiwanese release wrote 德魯依. Both spellings are still in use in the community. Before that it was a standard Dungeons & Dragons class, written 德魯伊 throughout Taiwan’s Chinese D&D 5E material. Blizzard is the company that made the word part of general vocabulary.

A widely repeated claim says 德魯伊 came into Chinese through Japanese ドルイド rather than straight from English, which would explain why it sounds so unlike the English word. Chinese Wikipedia’s article does not say this, and no primary source has been found. The syllable mapping fits ドルイド more neatly than it fits /ˈdruːɪd/. That fit is a reason to keep looking. It is not evidence.

The Coca-Cola name: what the record shows

The documented history has no contest and no prize. The name developed in the Shanghai market across the 1920s.

祝淳翔’s research traces the lineage back to 可口汽水 in 《時報圖畫周刊》 no. 160, dated 6 August 1923. Watsons (屈臣氏) ran 可口露 advertisements in 《申報》 on 1 May 1924 and in 《新聞報》 on 2 May 1924, and 可口水 appears in 《工商新聞》 on 10 October 1924. The first issue of 《商業雜誌》 in November 1926 states the mechanism directly: 可口係 coca 之譯音, 可口 is the transliteration of coca. So the sound mapping was explicit at the time. 葉新 found a May 1930 advertisement in 《商業雜誌》 reading 屈臣氏汽水可口可樂. The Coca-Cola Company applied for the trademark on 26 March 1930, received approval on 24 June 1931, and had it published in 商標公報 no. 54 on 15 August 1931. The agent of record was the American lawyer Norwood F. Allman (阿樂滿), who practised in Shanghai from 1916 to 1950 and served as Coca-Cola’s China counsel.

The two stories about the Coca-Cola name

The famous story is false. It says that in the mid-1930s Coca-Cola advertised in The Times offering £350 for a Chinese name, and that the London-based scholar 蔣彝 (Chiang Yee, the “Silent Traveller”) entered 可口可樂 and won. Taiwanese press including CNA still prints it. The dates rule it out. 蔣彝 did not reach London until 1933, and 可口可樂 was in print in 1930. In 1930 he was county magistrate of 九江 in Jiangxi, in China, and could not have entered a London contest. Two more objections stand: The Times is a British newspaper with no reason to run a Chinese-naming competition, and no such advertisement has ever been found.

The second story, also false, says that Coca-Cola’s earlier Chinese name was 蝌蝌啃蠟, “tadpoles bite wax.” It was never an official name. Its documented origin is Allman himself. He wrote it up in a 1957 issue of Coca-Cola Overseas as a negative example, a 荒誕字眼, an absurd rendering, to illustrate merchants who chase sound and ignore meaning. There is a real event under the story. Coke reached China around 1927–28 before the company had registered a Chinese name, so individual shopkeepers wrote their own characters on in-store placards, and some of those were nonsense. So “bite the wax tadpole” signs plausibly existed on shop walls. The claim that 蝌蝌啃蠟 was the official earlier brand name comes from that 1957 anecdote. It does not come from any 1927 label. Chinese Wikipedia files the whole set, the tadpoles, the £350, 蔣彝, as 傳聞, hearsay, and 備受質疑, heavily doubted.

What the Coca-Cola name means

The false stories do not change what the name does. 可 means to affirm or to be suitable. 口 is the mouth. 樂 read as lè is joy. 可口 kěkǒu is a real pre-existing Chinese word meaning tasty or palatable, and was not invented for the brand. 可樂 reads as “can be enjoyed”, and the brand has taken the word over so completely that in Taiwan 可樂 now means cola. 樂 has three readings, lè happy, yuè music, yào to be fond of, and learners often get it wrong; here it is lè. The name follows ko-ka-ko-la in sound and reads “tasty + joy” in meaning, both at once. Its ranking as the best brand translation ever made into Chinese is advertising-industry consensus, and the ranking has not been measured. The double fit is real, and it is why the example keeps being used.

The one decision, used for meaning or not

The sound of the source word fixes the syllables. The characters are the translator’s only decision. Using that decision for meaning gives 可口可樂: close to the sound, tasty and joyful in meaning, and in print in 1930, before any of the stories about its origin appeared. Leaving the decision unused gives 德魯伊 and 波拉勒斯, virtue-dull-he and wave-pull-bridle-this, whose characters were picked for sound alone and whose tones are the tones those characters had. The case where meaning is not used is the ordinary one. That is why the tones look random, why two localization teams can return the same city with different pitch, and why the person who owns the original word rarely recognizes it in the result.

How to practice this

1. Take a transliterated name you know and write out its characters. Look up each character’s tone. Notice that each tone is the tone of that character, with nothing taken from the English.
2. Count the syllables in the English word and in the Chinese one. Notice where a consonant cluster was split into two syllables. Notice where a final consonant became a syllable of its own.
3. Read the characters of 德魯伊 or 波拉勒斯 one at a time for their meanings. Notice that the string of meanings tells you nothing about the word.
4. Find one foreign name in a Taiwanese report and in a mainland report. Notice whether the first character differs. Notice whether the Taiwan form begins with a Chinese surname.
5. Say 可口可樂 aloud. Notice that the first 可 comes out rising, because two third tones in a row change the first one.
6. Find a transliteration that ends in -s. Notice whether the last syllable is 斯, read sī in first tone.

Related pages

• Sound Components: adjacent in the character cluster, on why tone is learned as a separate fact from the character that carries it.

Open questions

No Chinese-language study of 音譯詞聲調 using Taiwan-specific data has been located. The findings on loanword tone assignment from Glewwe and Chang are English-language and based on mainland or general Mandarin. The tone values for 可口可樂, 德魯伊 and 波拉勒斯 are identical in Taiwan and on the mainland, so the three worked examples are unaffected, but the general claims rest on sources that never looked at Taiwan.

The claim that 德魯伊 arrived through Japanese ドルイド is unsourced past aggregator sites. The syllable mapping fits, which is a reason to keep looking. It is not a reason to believe the claim.

Sources

• Transliteration Into Chinese (音譯): grounding, with every fact’s confidence marked.