Google Translate says "Happy Birthday, Jeff". "Jeff" is capitalized, so Google Translate knew it was a proper name. How do you represent a non-Chinese name in Chinese? If it's phonetic, how did GT know it was a name?
I don't know about the specific mechanism used by Google Translate (GT), but as I said in a
previous post Chinese characters (
hanzi) cannot always be read correctly in isolation. The
hanzi that make up 杰夫 (Jiéfū)
do have a number of individual meanings depending on context but are
a combination that GT has obviously been programmed to recognise.
GT does have a
huge problem with identifying names in Chinese, but it is, if anything, more a problem with
Chinese names (especially surnames) than Western ones. This is because Chinese names are are made up of fewer
hanzi than the phonetic representations of Western names, so it is more difficult for GT to pick them out. For example, the Chinese surname 黑 (Hēi) also means "black" or "dark", so GT translates 黑嘉嘉 (Hēi Jiājiā) as "black Jiajia" or sometimes even "black fine" instead of recognising correctly the name of the Australian-born professional
weiqi player. Only prominent Chinese people like 周恩来 (Mao Zedong) can count on having the
combination of
hanzi in their name recognised by GT.
In general terms, Western names are written in
hanzi that sound to the Chinese ear like the syllables of the name when spoken aloud. Normally the
hanzi for common given names are chosen from among the many homophones in Chinese so that their meaning is somewhat complimentary. For example many
hanzi could have been chosen to sound like "Jeff", "Geoff", or "Jeph" but 杰夫 translate as "distinguished man". Less common given names, surnames, and place names are handled more pragmatically:
巴拉克奥巴马 = Bālākè Àobāmǎ (Barak Obama, remember that ke is pronounced "kuh").
乔治布什 = Qiáozhì Bùshí (George Bush, remember that Q is pronounced "Ch", zhi is
roughly "juh", and shi is "shuh").
澳大利亚 ＝ Àodàlìyà (Australia)
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