The rest of the world knows him as Michael Phelps but the Chinese call him Maikeer Feierpusi.
All 10,000 (approx) athletes competing in the Chinese games were assigned a Chinese name.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the Chinese have their own system of assigning Chinese names: "to introduce the athletes to a vast domestic audience for whom Western names are just so much Greek.
The job of coming up with all those names falls to the seven members of the Xinhua News Agency's Proper Names Translation office. "One nation, one person, one name!" declares Li Chun, the director of the team referred to respectfully by his colleagues as "professor."
Assigning Chinese names is no easy task. Because Chinese has no alphabet, each syllable must be approximated with a character. And since every character has a meaning, translators must also seek to avoid those characters with negative or weird connotations.
The characters in Feierpusi (pronounced "fay are poo suh"), for example, could be read to mean "luxurious," a pronoun for "you," "common" and "this," although they don't communicate any specific meaning when combined. Women tend to receive more feminine characters; men, more masculine ones."
to read all my posts on Michael Phelps!!!!
Read more of my blog by clicking the title or subject listings on the right.
Email friends of my postings with the EMAIL icon at the bottom of each post.
And as always, feel free to comment.
Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment