Ok, not sure how we can tackle this one… our daughter has Australian and Taiwan passports.
Her Australian passport has her English name, no pinyin or romanisation.
But her English version of her Taiwan birth certificate AND household registration papers have her pinyin name one way BUT her Taiwan passport is the old Wade Giles way. Should we demand the MOFA visa folk to redo the passport with the pinyin the way WE want it? Will our daughter have ‘official’ type troubles with their being multiple pinyin versions of her name…? Or am I worrying too much?
[quote=“AWOL”]Ok, not sure how we can tackle this one… our daughter has Australian and Taiwan passports.
Her Australian passport has her English name, no Pinyin or romanisation.
But her English version of her Taiwan birth certificate AND household registration papers have her Pinyin name one way BUT her Taiwan passport is the old Wade Giles way. Should we demand the MOFA visa folk to redo the passport with the Pinyin the way WE want it? Will our daughter have ‘official’ type troubles with their being multiple Pinyin versions of her name…? Or am I worrying too much?[/quote]
What Pinyin besides Wade-Giles is being used? How is her name spelled?
If the Pinyin is Tongyong (monstrous and evil), I would do my utmost to unify the spellings under either Wade-Giles (traditional and classy) or Hanyu Pinyin (modern and worldwide standard). Otherise, I don’t think it’ll have any bearing, since in Taiwan the Chinese characters are the standard.
We chose the international standard pinyin for household reg and birth cert, but the Taiwan MOFA folk kindly ignored that as well as our deisre to have it spelt a certain way and gave us the ‘approved Taiwan pinyin’
Does the TW passport have the same English name that is listed on the AU passport? That is much more important, in my opinion, than the romanization on her TW passport.
Our children don’t even have any romanized form of their Chinese names on their TW passports. They only have the Chinese characters and the same English names that are on their US passports.
Great idea! Names like Mei-Ling would fit the bill. (The only discrepancy would be hyphenation, intercaps or oher syllable-joining conventions.)[/quote]
We beat the system there too - our daughter’s name is Pan Chu - qingchu (clear) de chu, and Pan is the surname, so we don’t have to worry about hyphens or intercaps or any other silliness.
Of course we didn’t choose a name based on the spelling, but once we had a list of final candidates, the common spelling was certainly a factor.
I don’t know about Australia, but for the US I believe that getting a (possibly notarized) statement from a professional translator, professor or similar wonky language type stating that the two Romanizations are both representations of the same underlying Chinese character name would do. It probably would also be good to point out places where the other information on both forms is identical (other relatives, addresses, DOB, whatever.)
Just my NT$0.66, you’d have to check to make sure.
Yeah well the Chinese staff at ACIO should not be giving out advice. You can add the Chinese name to the passport though perhaps.
I would try doing that first then dealing with MOFA. Of course if you have an English name of one parent and a Chinese name of another they should both be in the passport. Saves a lot of hassles later on.
