Characters Selection in Transliteration of Chinese Indonesian Names

Abstract

The translation of names, especially the translation of celebrities’ names, plays an important role both in Chinese language and culture. Therefore, when we translate other languages to Chinese, people’s names need to be translated, linguistically using transliteration. In the process of translating Indonesian to Chinese, the author often encounters the problem of Chinese Indonesian names’ translation (e.g. Tan Tek Ho), because there is no absolute standard in the field of name translation. Thus, the translated Chinese characters would be significantly different. For example, the transliterated name of Indonesian president Jokowi, it has at least two translations in Chinese with different characters. As the instrument, qualitative data analysis method is used in this research. The author aims to explore how to select Chinese characters and then to build a relatively reliable standard for Chinese Indonesian names transliteration through three aspects of analysis: the repetition rate of the same character in Chinese names, the characteristics of Chinese names and the characteristics of Chinese Indonesian names. The research finds out that selecting high-frequency characters, aesthetic meaning characters, gender-oriented characters and avoiding uncommon characters are the best way to transliterate Chinese Indonesian names from Latin to Chinese characters. Keywords—transliteration; Chinese Indonesian; name