This post is mostly out of curiosity, rather than any practical need, but I was reading NHK’s easy news articles today, and they have an article about the ongoing situation with the Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai ([https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/k10013370991000/k10013370991000.html](https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/k10013370991000/k10013370991000.html)).
In the article the athletes name is given as “彭帥” which is her name in chinese characters, and I presume (I don’t study chinese – yet) is pronounced as something resembling “Peng Shuai”
However, the furigana in the news article gives the pronounciation of the Kanji as “ほうすい” which would be a Japanese rendering of the Kanji, but is not very similar to the person’s actual name.
Is this a standard practise in Japan? If you are from a country where your name is written in chinese characters, do the Japanese simply give you a new ‘name’ based on a japanese reading of the characters?
It would have seemed simple enough to have furigana reading “ペングシュアイ” or something?
Is this a cultural thing, or are the furigana automatically generated, perhaps?
3 comments
Complete guess, but maybe the furigana is added in automatically and not by a person.
Many Chinese names are read in Japanese with their *On* reading rather than the Mandarin reading, especially public figures (e.g. 習近平 is always しゅうきんぺい in Japanese, not シー・ジンピン). For average Chinese people living in Japan, they might use one or the other (or both in different contexts – my university would always call Chinese students by the *On* reading of their Chinese name, but outside of class we’d often call them by their Chinese name converted to katakana e.g. 黄さん (Huang) was コウさん in class and ホアンさん outside of it).
[彭帥](https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%BD%AD%E5%B8%A5) has katakana-ised Chinese reading ポン・シュアイ, though Wiki (see link) has the Japanese reading as ほう・すい. I haven’t been following the news on her in Japanese so don’t know which one is most common right now in practice; just judging by a quick search ほう・すい is probably more common since no one’s giving the reading.
EDIT: kept scrolling the news page I had and other outlets are either giving no reading (so they expect the reader to read as in Japanese) or giving it as ほう・すい, so that’s the most common one, and that makes sense to me since she’s a public figure.
This is a standard practice with Chinese names that makes it bewildering to hear about China in Japan. Mao Zedong is Mou Takutou, Xi Jinping is Syuu Kinpei, etc.
Korean names are usually not rendered in Chinese characters, but even when they are, the pronunciation is a Korean one.