Your name in another script

Every tool on this page does the same thing and none of them translates anything. They take your name as it sounds and write those sounds with someone else's letters, so that what comes out is still your name, readable aloud by someone who has never seen it before. That operation is called transliteration, and it is what a newspaper does with a foreign politician.

Which script you pick changes the result more than you would expect, because these writing systems are not the same kind of thing. Most of them are alphabets, so your name arrives with its sounds more or less intact: Tibetan, Thai, Hindi, Arabic and Russian all spell it letter by letter, even where the letters stack or join in ways the Latin alphabet never does. Korean is an alphabet too, but one whose letters are grouped into square syllable blocks, so a long name comes out shorter and denser than it looks. Japanese has a syllabary rather than an alphabet, which means every consonant has to bring a vowel with it, and a name ending in a consonant will grow a syllable it did not have.

Chinese is the one that behaves differently, and it has a page of its own for that reason. It has no alphabet at all, so a name has to borrow characters for their sound, and every character borrowed carries a meaning along with it. A Chinese transliteration therefore always says something in passing, which is why conventions exist for which characters to use and which to avoid.

The heading says Asian and two of these are not, which is worth saying plainly rather than leaving as a puzzle. Arabic and Russian are here because what these pages have in common is a script that a Latin alphabet reader cannot sound out, not a continent. If you came looking for your name in Cyrillic, you are in the right place.

One thing to expect from all of them: the result reads as a foreign name to a native reader, because it is one. That is the point when you want to be recognisable, and it is the thing to be sure of before the text goes anywhere permanent. Have it read by someone who knows the script first.

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