Please help me to translate my name!

Hello everyone.

I’m currently a Canadian resident, but I have been adopted from Taiwan.
I would like to know more about my origin and my country of birth.

My birthname on the official english papers is Chi-Yu Cheng (鳴 宇 郑), but I have been told that the translation is more like Ming Yu Zheng.

Does this name mean anything? Is it a common surname? etc.

Thank you very much, this is very important to me.

It is a common Chinese surname, the 12th most common in Taiwan by one count.

Thank you!

The translation of 鳴 宇 is Chiu-Yu or is it Ming Yu?

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/鳴

It’s Ming. I don’t see any indication that this character has ever had any reading “Chiu” or similar.

鳴 is pronounced “ming”, and I see no sources that say it has an alternative reading.

So basically the people who wrote my adoption papers in english didn’t know how to read mandarin. Anyway thank you to both of you tempogain and Chris.

I guess :slight_smile: I took a quick look and didn’t even see any character they might have mistaken it for. Probably a simple mistake and/or a failure to check a dictionary. It’s not an especially common character, but I immediately identify it as “ming” and I’m hardly a scholar.

Hmmm. If it’s “chi” though, the character 鳮, simplified form of 雞 is pretty similar. It means “chicken” and wouldn’t be part of a name, but maybe the source of the confusion.

This is the real version with the original writting. I couldn’t upload a pdf on here.

It looks like 鳩, dove, jiu in Hanyu Pinyin.

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Wow I did not know that chinese characters were so complicated.

Yeah, I agree. It’s not 鳴 Ming, but 鳩 Chiu.

I believe you are right, so they were not so dumb after all haha.

The complete name would be Chiu Yu Zheng or Yu Chiu Zheng?

In Chinese it would be Zheng Jiu-Yu, family name coming first.