In Reply to: question posted by miriam on February 08, 2003 at 07:17:47:
There are a couple of different ways to do this--you can either find out what Martin and Matthew mean and go with characters that have similar meanings, or you can find some characters that make similar sounds. Keep in mind that in Chinese characters it's the meaning that really matters. The pronunciation changes for Mandarin, Cantonese, and various other dialects. They use Chinese characters in Korea and Japan, too, but pronounce them differently.
I just found out that in China, when they talk about people from other Asian countries, they don't say their names the same way, but they use the same characters with their own pronunciation. "Yoko Ono" is pronounced entirely different in China. It's not just sounds, it MEANS something.
You can get a Chinese dictionary and look up characters for Light, Family, Happiness, Power Tools, etc... how are you going to look up Martin? What is Martin? If you go to a name dictionary and find out that Martin means "warlike," you could find a Chinese character for War and claim that it's the name Martin in Chinese. Matthew apparently means "gift of God," which should translate very nicely.
If you really want to find characters that make the same sounds as Martin and Matthew (make the same sounds WHERE? Mandarin? Cantonese? Japanese?) then you can start with http://zhongwen.com/s/ziyin.htm where there's a list of pinyin syllables. You can go through the list and find characters that you like. Of course, you run into the problem that there is no "Mar" sound. You'll probably have to go with "Ma." Here is a common Ma character that means Horse http://zhongwen.com/d/176/x168.htm In fact, you could use that one to start both Martin AND Matthew. You're lucky that both these names start with the same sound. If you don't like the horse one, you could go with this one which means Curse http://zhongwen.com/d/189/x124.htm or this one which means Leprosy http://zhongwen.com/d/183/x242.htm
Martin could either be "Ma-tan" or "Ma-tun." There's no "tin" given. For "tan" you could use this character which means Lake http://zhongwen.com/d/188/x230.htm or this one which means Corruption http://zhongwen.com/d/179/x103.htm or this one which means Phlegm http://zhongwen.com/d/183/x240.htm
So, "Ma-tan," depending on the characters you use, could be either Horse Lake or Leprosy Phlegm.
Of course, that's just one pronunciation. Somebody else from another place would look at those same characters and say them quite differently.
: i would like to know how to write these two names in chinese, which are:
: * MARTIN
: * MATTHEW
: thanks for your co-operation and I would appreciate a lot if you'll answer me as soon as possible
: thanks for all,
: Miriam