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Help With Japanese Name-Translations?

From:Steg Belsky <draqonfayir@...>
Date:Friday, October 4, 2002, 14:14
I know there are usually some Japanese-speakers around here, would any of
them be able to help me with something?
This past summer i took two semesters worth of Japanese.  In class, we
learned how to transliterate our names into Katakana.  But, i'd like to
know if it's possible for me to translate my names without it sounding
weird to a Japanese-speaker.

Based on words i learned in class, and stuff i looked up in the
dictionary at
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/jwb/wwwjdic?1C , i've so
far come up with:

shika-kan shiro-hito
(if this (Shift-?)JIS stuff works properly: ュ \xA5 \x94\x92\x90l )
shika (deer) = my Hebrew firstname, |tzvi-hersh|
kan (crown) = my English firstname, |stephen|
shiro-hito (white man) = literal translation of my lastname, |belsky|,
which is supposed to be a Russification of an original lastname in
Yiddish/German |vaisman/weissman|.

http://www.takase.com/Names/NameInJapaneseH.htm translates the name
"Hirsh" (meaning 'deer') as |shika|, but i don't know if that's supposed
to be 'just' a translation, or also a usable name.  Technically, the
|hersh| in |tzvi-hersh| is supposed to be |hirsh|, but my family (on both
sides) has a history of spelling issues, so my parents named me wrong.
But, according to a Yiddish dictionary i looked up a few years ago,
|hersh| with an /e/ means something having to do with 'dominion' or
'ruling', so it actually fits better with |stephen| than it would if it
were just the Ashkenazic Hebrew-Yiddish translation name |tzvi=hersh|.

That "Name In Japanese" site translates my English middlename, |elliot|,
as |shinja| "believer", which i guess sort of makes sense on an
interpretive level if |elliot| is supposed to come from the Hebrew name
|eliyahu| (Elijah) "my god is God".  But, it doesn't have an entry for
Ephraim, my Hebrew middlename |efrayim|, which has to do with
'fruitfulness', 'production' and 'success'.  So i looked up stuff in the
online dictionary, and got |seika| (\x90\xAC\x89\xCA if this stuff works), but i have
no idea about that one either, if it makes a good translation or if it
can be used as a name.

And my email program keeps on saying that this message is JIS when i
originally told it to be Shift-JIS, bleah...

|arigatou gozaimasu| if anyone can help me with this!


-Stephen (Steg)
 "there is darkness all around us;
  but if darkness *is*, and the darkness is of the forest,
  then the darkness must be good."
     ~ song of the BaMbuti in troubled times

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Douglas Koller, Latin & French <latinfrench@...>