Since English classes are now standard in most secondary schools, it is increasingly common to see foreign names and terms left in their original form in Chinese texts.

[citation needed] However, for mass media and marketing within China and for non-European languages, particularly those of the Chinese minorities, transcription into characters remains very common.

Modern Han Chinese consists of about 412 syllables[1] in 5 tones, so homophones abound and most non-Han words have multiple possible transcriptions.

In the People's Republic of China, the process has been standardized by the Proper Names and Translation Service of the state-run Xinhua News Agency.

[6] Besides proper names, a small number of loanwords also found their way into Chinese during the Han dynasty after Zhang Qian's exploration of the Western Regions.

The transcriptions made during the Tang dynasty are particularly valuable, as the then-popular Tantra sect required its mantras to be rendered very carefully into Chinese characters, since they were thought to lose their efficacy if their exact sounds were not properly uttered.

In the Ming dynasty, the Chinese government's Bureau of Translators (四夷馆 Sìyí Guǎn) and the Bureau of Interpreters (会同馆 Huìtóng Guǎn) published bilingual dictionaries/vocabularies of foreign languages like the Bureau of Translators' multilingual dictionary (华夷译语 Huá-Yí yìyǔ, 'Sino-Barbarian Dictionary'), using Chinese characters to phonetically transcribe the words of the foreign languages such as Jurchen, Korean, Japanese, Ryukyuan, Mongolian, Old Uyghur, Vietnamese, Cham, Dai, Thai, Burmese, Khmer, Persian,[12][13] Tibetan, Malay, Javanese, Acehnese, and Sanskrit.

[18] Solon, Mongolian, and Manchu speakers were consulted with on the "correct" pronunciations of the names and words and their Chinese transcriptions were accordingly changed.

These savants in their reformatory zeal, proceeded on the idea, that all the proper names had been incorrectly rendered in the official documents of the Mongols, and had to be changed.

By this way of corrupting the names of the original historios, which have generally rendered foreign sounds as correctly as the Chinese language permits, the K'ien-lung editions of these works have become completely unserviceable for historical and geographical investigations.

After the three histories had been corrupted, K'ien-lung ordered the same committee to explain the meanings of the new names; and this gave rise to a new work entitled: 遼金元史語解 Liao kin yüan shi yü kai, or "Explanation of words (proper names) found in the histories of the Liao, Kin and Yüan."

This renders the vocabulary very useful for reference, and we may lay aside the fact, that the principal object in view of the learned committee, was the absurd explanation of the meaning of the newly-invented names.

The committee however transformed the name into 巴實伯里 Ba-shi-bo-li, and state that Ba-shi in the language of the Mohammedans means "head" and bo-li "kidneys."

The most recent edition of the Yüan shi (also with corrupted proper names) is dated 1824, but Archimandrite Palladius has noticed that it was only finished about twenty years later.

At one time he appointed a learned committee of Chinese, Manchus, Mongols, and Western Mohammedans to revise the foreign names of men and places which occur in the Yüan Records.

Many of these phonemic loans proved to be fads, however, and popular usage and linguistic reformers subsequently favored calques or neologisms in their place.

For example, Modern Standard Chinese 声纳 shēngnà "sonar", uses the characters 声 shēng "sound" and 纳 nà "receive, accept".

送 sòng 'deliver, carry, give (as a present)', 松 sōng 'pine; loose, slack', 耸 sǒng 'tower; alarm, attract' etc.

In literary translations, Utopia was famously transcribed by Yan Fu as 烏托邦/乌托邦 Wūtuōbāng ("unfounded country") and Pantagruel was written as 龐大固埃/庞大固埃 Pángdàgù'āi, from 龐大/庞大 ("gigantic") and 固 ("solid", "hefty").

During the Qing dynasty, some Chinese scholars were unhappy to find China was located on a continent called 亞細亞/亚细亚 Yàxìyà, i.e. Asia, as 亞/亚 means "secondary" and 細/细 "small", believing that the Europeans were deliberately belittling the East.

[28] The ancient Japanese, or the Wa people were upset by their name being represented by the character 倭 wō ("small, short, servile") by the Chinese, and replaced it with 和 hé ("peace, harmony").

However, some translations are generally held to be inappropriate and are usually not used in today's transcriptions: According to Ghil'ad Zuckermann, phono-semantic matching in Chinese is common in four semantic domains: brand names, computer jargon, technological terms and toponyms.

[34] For example, sources in Hong Kong and Macau follow the mainland transcription 普京 for Putin, even though its Cantonese pronunciation being Póugīng.

In the first half of 2016, Nintendo announced that it would change Pikachu's name from its original Cantonese name, Béikāchīu 比卡超, to Pèihkāyāu in favor of fitting the Mandarin pronunciation, Píkǎqiū 皮卡丘, in the most recent series of Pokémon games, Pokémon Sun and Moon,[35] in order to standardize marketing in the Greater China region.

Therefore, in many cases, the Chinese names non-Chinese people adopt for themselves are not those that are phonetically equivalent but are instead "adapted" from or "inspired" by (i.e., translations of) the original.

江, for instance, was formed out of 氵 (the water radical) + 工, which at the time had the sound value khong,[5] to approximate the Yue name *Krong.

Such phono-semantic compounds make up the majority of Chinese characters, but new ones coined to communicate foreign words only infrequently reach common use today.