The other day at work, I had to explain to both a coworker the intricacies of Chiang Kai-shek fleeing the Chinese mainland from Mao Zedong's coming Communist forces, and later the Cultural Revolution in China (大文化革命）. Not knowing how to say their respective names in Japanese, I first tried to katakana-ize them. To no avail. Then, I checked my English-Japanese dictionary. No dice. Finally, I went to old reliable, 広辞苑, my standby in tough situations like this. It turns out a lot of these Chinese names are transliterated in completely different ways than their English counterparts. Some examples:
Mao Zedong ⇒ 毛沢東（もうたくとう）
Deng Xiaopeng ⇒ 鄧小平（とうしょうへい）
Chiang Kai-shek⇒ 蒋介石（しょうかいせき）
Zhou Enlai ⇒ 周恩来（しゅうおんらい）
3 comments:
That doesn't sound very fun at all ;0_0
huh?!?
Thats probably because these Chinese names still use the same charcaters as in Chinese but just use Japanese pronounciation. I might be wrong.
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