Someone in our group chat asked a small question: what exactly is the relationship between che li zi and cherry, and why do we use both words in Chinese? One answer led to another, and soon we were trading older and stranger renderings. Newton was once called Nai Duan when his name first entered China; Victor Hugo was Xiao E; Shakespeare was Xia Si Pi Er; and in Yan Fu's Tian Yan Lun, Galileo became Jia Li Lie Wo. A China Daily language column on che li zi, ban ji and xi leng steak explains why: in earlier decades there were no unified rules for translating proper names, and old books could not simply be reprinted with corrections, so several renderings of the same name circulated together.
Old Cantonese transliterations are even more down to earth. Pancake is ban ji, strawberry is shi duo pi li, tuxedo is ti si tu, sirloin is xi leng, and a shop is shi duo from store; in egg tart, the egg was translated for meaning as dan and the tart transliterated as ta, half and half. The same tennis player is Jokovic in Mandarin and zou gou wik in Cantonese, and reading the latter aloud in Cantonese makes the connection obvious. Mandarin hides loanwords too: che li zi comes from cherries, sha ma te from smart, xue pin from shopping, and ka from card. Some scholars argue that the Chinese character for ka originally had only the reading qiao, and that the reading ka arose only after it was linked to card, later producing a whole family of words such as truck and checkpoint.
Dialects hold colder cases still. In old Beijing speech, e le jin de was an approximation of elegant used by Manchu bannermen learning English, meaning something like refined or particular; Shanghainese calls a roof window lao hu chuang, transliterating roof and translating window, and calls a sale ang san from on sale. In Qingdao, a drain is gu li from the German Gully and a young woman da man from Damen. An article from China Science Communication adds two tempting false friends. The Ming dynasty term Fo Lang Ji for European cannons and their makers actually traces back to Frank, a name used by Muslims in Southeast Asia for Christian European countries and adopted by Ming writers; it referred first to Portugal, then to Spain, and in the Qing period, by similar sound, to France. The word fa lang for enamel, by contrast, comes from Fu Lin, an old Persian name for Rome. They look related and are not. Japanese udon is written with characters derived from wonton; according to Okumura Takeo, who translated Qi Min Yao Shu, the change happened in the Kamakura period when temples served hot noodles, borrowed the tun from hun tun and replaced hun with a character meaning warm. Udon and wonton are thus distantly kin.
These come from two China Daily language columns, a China Science Communication article and a published piece on loanwords, spanning the Ming and Qing dynasties to the present day. They make good tea-break material, but behind them sits a rule that has not aged at all.
1. Why old renderings look so odd: the sound was local, the characters were borrowed
Transliteration was never a matter of reading a dictionary aloud in standard Mandarin. Ban ji, shi duo pi li and ti si tu only resemble their originals in Cantonese; e le jin de is elegant as heard in Beijing at the time; gu li and da man carry the traces of German influence in Qingdao. One Djokovic becoming two Chinese names is not an error but a difference in the accent used to record the sound. Chinese characters also carry meaning of their own, so combinations like Xiao E or ti si tu acquire an accidental comic image — which is precisely why they spread so readily today.
In the late Qing and early Republic there was no standard for proper names, translators worked from the sounds and characters available to them, and printed books could not be corrected, so one name with several renderings became normal. What looks strange now was, in its own setting, careful work. An unfamiliar old rendering in a historical document should therefore prompt the question which sound system and which convention produced it, not the assumption that somebody got it wrong.
2. Not a joke but four mechanisms still in use
Laid out together, these words fall into four groups: pure transliteration (che li zi, shi duo, gu li), pure sense translation (most technical terms), half sound and half sense (egg tart, lao hu chuang), and transliteration plus a category word or gloss (xi leng steak, Fo Lang Ji). Che li zi survived alongside the native word for cherry partly to distinguish imported cherries from local ones — marketing and category distinction can keep a rendering alive. Xue pin translated an emotional charge that shopping never had in English, and ended up more apt than a literal version. The same judgement is still required today: whether a loanword enters Chinese by sound, by sense, or by sound plus a note depends on who will read it, where it will be used, and whether it must be distinguished from an existing word.
The rule translators actually have to keep is one name, one rendering: the same person, institution, place or product must have a single written form across a set of documents. Historical renderings especially must not be quietly corrected. In old contracts, certificates and publications, the form used in the original must be preserved in translation and proofreading, with a note added if explanation is needed. Changing one character breaks the cross-references.
3. The machine era makes the proper-name list more necessary, not less
During the Double Eleven festival, thousands of SKU names, overseas company names and places of origin have to be fixed within days. Guangzhou Customs compares declared data with physical goods using a big-data model, and receiving bodies check translations against originals field by field. A person who meets an unfamiliar rendering pauses to think; a system does not — it recognises the one string in its table. One company written three ways across three documents will be guessed as the same company by a human and flagged as inconsistent by a machine.
That is why the plain habits of older translators are worth more now: fix the proper-name list before starting (legal names, former names, regional variants, prohibited forms), check the source and record the basis when unsure, and verify every name before delivery instead of improvising on the day. The old renderings are fun to laugh at; on a live file, not one character is allowed to drift.
4. To finish
How the festival pushed text capacity and automated checking to their limit is in sixteen-minute clearance and six hundred million declarations. What a translation must look like when the receiving party checks it field by field is in from the digital customs officer to certificate translation. And the next time someone asks what che li zi has to do with cherry, there is always Nai Duan and Xiao E to add to the answer.