MARTIN in Chinese

Two ways to have a Chinese name, and they are not the same thing

A foreign name can be brought into Chinese by sound or by meaning, and the choice matters more than it looks. Transliteration takes your name syllable by syllable and finds characters that sound close: it is what newspapers do with foreign politicians, and what this tool does. The result is recognisably your name, pronounceable by a Chinese speaker, and instantly identifiable as foreign.

Nothing is neutral about the characters chosen, though, and that is worth knowing. Every Chinese character has a meaning, so a transliteration always says something in passing. Established conventions exist precisely to avoid accidents: certain characters are used for foreign names because they are pleasant or empty of strong sense, and others are avoided because they would make a name comic or unfortunate. That convention is what the tool follows.

The other way is a real Chinese name: a one-syllable family name from the traditional stock and a given name of one or two characters chosen for what they mean. It does not sound like your name at all, and that is the point. It is what a student living in China is usually given by a teacher or a friend, and it is a different tool on this site.

For names in scripts other than Chinese, the other converters here write the same name in Tibetan, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Hindi, Arabic or Russian.