When I set out to learn about 20th and 21st-century literature from China, I knew I would need to find the very best translations in English. What I did not foresee was that an essential element of any text was not translatable: the author’s name.

I knew that Chinese names are formatted so that the surname or family name always appears first, but searching about on the internet I discovered that the convention was not always followed, and most noticeably so on American English websites. To show proper respect to a person, it is essential to respect their name, but I found I have to work hard to reassure myself that I share an author’s name correctly. How does the name appear in Amazon? Goodreads? On the dust jacket? On a review coming out of England or one coming out of California? I trust the publisher, but the name can appear differently in the editor-less web.

Pro tip #1: Wikipedia is good at getting it right.

Pro Tip #2 Like the Romans, romanization is not to be taken at face value; it may cause more problems than it solves.

For example, consider this attempt at reforming romanization. (This is for all of you who grew up in the 70s). Americans used to learn in school that the capital of China was Peking. Then, in 1986, The New York Times adopted Beijing, which more closely captured the actual sound signifiers for the city. That started a reformation of sounds that continued into the early 90s.

Consider how much damage is done to an East Asian name as it is romanized for a western audience. Teachers of students from China who retain all or part of their Chinese names know that reading these names as written on the attendance roll can induces polite chuckles or averted eyes. Some students will correct us directly, others will help us with pronouncing their names in a one-on-one conversation. And when they pronounce their name as it should be pronounced I invariably look back at the romanized version and wonder how we westerners got this so fantastically wrong.

When I began this project, I imagined that these same students would be able to help me on occasion if I was struggling with an author’s name. As it happens, romanization is so obfuscatory that if I show a group of students from mainland China, Taiwan, or Hong Kong a list of Chinese authors whose names had been romanized, they have no idea who these letters might represent. They often begin by staring at the list in confusion. Who are these people? They might as well be reading another language, and, in fact, they are. I think they are working hard to hear the sounds that are missing, reverse engineering the name, trying to restore the information that the romanization process strips away.

Another surprise is that romanization can leave all clues to the author’s gender on the cutting room floor. I am often trying to build my knowledge of women writers from different cultures, so I’ve shared a list of authors whose names have been romanized with native Mandarin or Cantonese speakers and asked them if they can help me narrow the list to only women. They explain that the clues to that question have been removed.

And to compound matters further, about a half year into the project I discovered that many Chinese authors follow a long tradition of using pseudonyms. The best of them are hilarious. Mo Yan? It means “Don’t Speak!” Can Xue? Her name means “stubborn snow,” which can refer to both that dirty snow that lingers on sidewalks to the end of winter or the last snow to melt on a sunny mountaintop. Wikipedia articles are good at supplying the author’s real name, pseudonym, and translation of the pseudonym.

Perhaps you are negotiating these challenges with names too?

I hope you are finding it as interesting as I am!

I leave you with this wonderful bit of information about the author of The Condor Shooting Heroes:

The author’s name is romanized as Louis Cha. His legal name is Luis Cha Leung Yung. He is also known on the mainland by the pseudonym Jin Rong, which in Cantonese is pronounced Gum Yoong.