However, as applied to all Chinese characters, 蘇格蘭 can be transliterated into Vietnamese as Tô Cách Lan, which strays a bit further from the native English and Scots name.
By the nature of the writing system itself, Chinese characters tend to preserve a word's syllable count, morphemes, and meanings more reliably than they do as an accurate representation of the word's pronunciation, considering that the Chinese character system itself primarily represents logograms (though some have elements of phonetic information) as opposed to phonemes of the language.
Currently, the countries still called by their Sino-Vietnamese names are: China, Egypt, India, Japan, Korea, Mongolia, Russia, Thailand, Turkey, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK, England, the US and Australia.
Thus, place names outside of East Asia can often be respelled in a way that Vietnamese can pronounce it using a transcription method called Vietnamization.
Hong Kong and Macau names are borrowed from English by direct transliteration into Hồng Kông and Ma Cao instead of Hương Cảng and Áo Môn in Sino-Vietnamese pronunciation.
The names of Phnom Penh, Vientiane and Bangkok are directly transcribed from Khmer ភ្នំពេញ Phnum Pénh, Lao ວຽງຈັນ Viangchan and Thai บางกอก Bāngkxk into Vietnamese as Phnôm Pênh, Viêng Chăn and Băng Cốc.
Ivory Coast is translated into Vietnamese as Bờ Biển Ngà, and at times it is transcribed from French as Cốt Đivoa.