Back in the 1980s, there was a huge rise in the number of educated Chinese wants to immigrate to western countries. I think it’s partially due to how Chinese translations of some of the western countries. Even though the names have little to do with the countries or culture, it created a fantasized version of the country in the hearts of many Chinese people.

For example, the United States is translated as the “beautiful country”. France is translated as the “lawful country”. Germany is translated as the “honor country”. England is translated as the “handsome country”. Italy is translated as the “meaningful country”. Canada is translated as the “plus country”. Sweden is translated as the “intelligent country”. Ireland is translated as the “love country”. Czech is translated as the “fast country”. Of course, I romanticized a little bit here and added some of my personal touches, but the idea is not far from what people thought.

There are some that’s more on the quirky side. Like Span is translated as the “west country”, and Portugal is translated as the “grape country”.

These translations are due to the fact that Chinese characters have different tones for each pronunciation. Although differentiable by a native Chinese speaker, each tone does sound rather similar. And for each tone, there are many characters that sound exactly the same. For example, in English, the word “beat” can mean both sound rhythm or hit something. But you can expect upwards of tens of words that sound exactly the same in Chinese. So if you see a Chinese person with the same first or last name, you can probably expect tens of variations in Chinese, even though the Romanized spelling is the same.

Because of translation is mostly done by sound and each sound in Chinese could mean many different things, people often choose the word with the best meaning for translation. So the resulting country names are often carry well intentioned meaning. Because these western countries are the first contacted Chinese culture, their country name translations often took the best translations. Compare to African countries or Latin America countries, there are rarely any well meaning translations. They often just trying to stay on the non-offensive side.