U.S. and Beijing Disagree on Obama’s Chinese Name: Global Geographic Times, China

According to this blog entry from the Web site of China’s Global Geographic Times, a U.S. Embassy request that China use a new spelling of Obama’s Chinese name has been met with suspicion among that nation’s ‘Netizens.’

So what’s in a name, one might ask?

For the Global Geographic Times, Scholar Jiang Huai writes in part:

“On November 12, officials at the U.S. Embassy in China told reporters that the U.S. president’s name had been changed. (The president’s name is written with three Chinese characters, and they wanted to change the first so that, when read out loud, it sounds more like ‘Oubama’ (???) rather than ‘Aobama’ (???)).”

Puzzling over the explanation for this, Jiang Huai writes:

“When people translate Chinese, they often fail to pay close attention to the sound of Chinese characters. The U.S. suspects that the original name ‘Aobama’ contains the Chinese characters for ‘Australia’ and ‘fawn over.’ Now that China and Australia are increasingly close, the U.S. will of course be concerned about this. ‘Oubama,’ on the other hand, includes the Chinese characters for ‘Europe’ and ‘fawn over,’ within which may be hidden America’s great ambition to have Europeans once again pledge their allegiance to it.”

By Scholar Jiang Huai (????)

Translated by Jimmy Chow

November 13, 2009

People’s Republic of China – Global Geographic Times – Original Article (Chinese)

What’s the best name???

On November 12, officials at the U.S. Embassy in China told reporters that the U.S. president’s name had been changed. (The president’s name is written with three Chinese characters, and they wanted to change the first so that, when read out loud, it sounds more like “Oubama” (???) instead of “Aobama” (???)). Embassy officials explained that this transliteration was closer to the English. Is this just about an American word, or is there something else going on here?

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