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Chinese Characters for Names
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lordoftheweb -

Hello all,

I am planning on getting my son and daughters names tattoo'd on my forearm, and would like to do
it in chinese lettering. I find the lettering so beautiful, and want it to be a permanent part of
me.

What I am looking for is the chinese characters of these names:

Shayla (thats my daughter)

and

Cole (thats my son)

any help would be extremely appreciated.

Thank you all in advance.



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kenneth_cn -

Shayla 莎拉


Cole 科尔










lordoftheweb -

yes, Shayla is one name, and Cole is the other name.

I have found the characters for Shayla on a couple of sites, and Cole on one site, but I wanted to
confirm them with someone that knows how to read/write chinese lettering (i apologize, i dont know
the proper term for the language).

Shayla = (chinese character(s))

Cole = (chinese character(s))

Does anyone know? Thanks!










imron -

Please bear in mind before you get these tattooed permanently on your skin that these are simply
transliterations of the English names into Chinese characters. If you asked a Chinese person what
they meant, they almost certainly wouldn't be able to get the original name back, and to them it
just looks like gibberish. Chinese doesn't have "lettering" like English does. There are thousands
of characters, and in addition to representing a sound, each character contains a meaning (or a
partial meaning), and if you put characters that don't belong together next to each other, then it
just doesn't make sense.

So yes, when pronounced together those characters sound sort of almost like the English names you
provided, but at the same time, the same would have been true if the names of your children were
Sarah and Carl - which you could also approximate to the same characters.

In any event they are clearly not names in Chinese, and the fact is, you really can't do a 1-1
mapping of an English name to a Chinese name. Chinese names often contain a complex meaning that
represents the dreams and hopes a parent has for their child. So rather than tattooing Chinese
gibberish that sort of, almost, maybe, could sound a little bit like the names of your children,
perhaps just getting the names tattooed in English would be a safer (albeit less trendy) option.

Edit:
BTW, lordoftheweb, I'm not sure if your computer can display Chinese characters, but kenneth_cn
provided a translation of those names for you in his post, to the right of the English names.
Those were the names I was talking about in this post.










imron -

Just another thought, if you're dead-set on getting Chinese characters tattooed, perhaps you could
have the name in English followed by/above/below the chinese for son or daughter.

女兒 Shayla
兒子 Cole

What I've written above means literally:

Daughter Shayla
Son Cole










Lu -

Imron is completely right.
And, is it just me or is 莎拉 more easily associated with 'salad' than with any name?










lordoftheweb -

thank you for the responses thus far. im not sure how to change the settings on my computer to
allow it to view lettering on this forum, but it does display lettering from other forums. And no,
my computer displays kenneth_cn's post (and yours as well imron) as:

?? Shayla

?? Cole

Thats not a bad idea of using the words "daughter" and "son" and their names in english.

Any suggestions on how to change the settings? I've thought this through over the last two years,
and am pretty much set on getting this done, but just want to do it right.

And thanks for the help and suggestions everyone. I appreciate it.










imron -

If you want to do it right, just remember that there is no "right" way to write an English name in
Chinese. Anyone who says otherwise either doesn't know what they are talking about or is trying to
take advantage of the fact that you don't know any better.

Anyway, if the websites you've been looking at are specifically for creating Chinese "names" for
English speakers it's quite possible that they are just generating image files (like jpg, gif)
because they will know many of their visitors won't have Chinese fonts installed.

If you are using windows XP, then to install Chinese fonts, and support for Chinese language (so
you can see the text written in the posts above), you will need to go to start->control
panel->regional and language settings, then click on the languages tab, and select "install files
for east asian languages" (you will need the Windows XP CD to do this). Once these are installed,
you will possibly also need to restart your web-browser.

If you can't get that working, or if you are using a different OS, I've attached a jpg image
containing the same text that I wrote above. The font I've used is just a stock standard Chinese
font that you might find used for newspapers etc, so it's probably not the most artistic thing to
use for a tattoo.










heifeng -

May I just suggest that maybe if you are really going to get a tattoo, have it say something like
my children our my everything or my great fortune, or something along that line. (ok If i were to
guess I would say 我子女我一切or我子女我幸福) I think that there must be a good way in
Chinese to say this, (maybe a Chinese speaker can add something here), plus then it will carry
along the meaning along with it, other than it just saying the word 'son' or 'daughter', or their
names' pronunciation translated into chinese characters. Don't worry, something like this should
be able to be expressed in only a few characters and also be pretty...if the tattoo is also well
done

Since you've waited two years, then you might as well really do some good research into this since
each Chinese characters has a deep meaning, so simply expressing something phonetically isn't
quite the same.

Hope this helps










roddy -

Agree with that - if you really want Chinese characters you are much better off with an idiom or
perhaps a line from a poem, which will express the same sentiment and actually mean something.
Basically, if you get your kids 'Chinese name' tattooed on yourself, Chinese people are still
going to have to ask 'So, what are their names?'












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