What can or can not be translated to kanji?

Names? Anything we want?

Just curious..

as far as I know, anything in an English dictionary can be put into Kanji - it may not be a necessarily 'good' translation.

proper nouns, like names etc are trickier...since names don't really have meaning per se. so what Japanese do is fall back on using a phonetic character set, called katakana. not sure how other asian languages address foreign terms in writing though...

an example - your name: "Brian". doesn't have a solid meaning or definition, so the name can only be 'kanafied' into katakana in order for japanese to reproduce it's sound from writing.

Brian, becomes "Bu-ra-i-a-n" in japanese.

to find out which katakana, look up each phonetic syllable here:
http://www.takase.com/Names/HowToWritePart1.htm

(it also has an example of how 'brian' looks in katakana, btw)

not sure if that answered your question...

Just as an aside, American, England, France, Portugal are called by the Chinese as:-

America = Mei Guo (Mei = beautiful, Guo = country) what they did was to just use the sound of the 'mer' in Amer and called the country 'Mei'

England = Yeng Guo (Yeng = brave) again just using the 'eng' to get Yeng

France = Faar Guo (Faar = Legalistic)

Portugal = Pu Tau Yaa (Pu Tau = grapes, Yaa = land of) using 'Portu' to get Pu Tau.

So, do the chinese names for these countries bear the 'correct meaning' they ascribe to them?

America is beautiful, England is brave, France is legalistic and Portugal is full of grapes.

whats crablord

Consider my lack of reply a christmas gift.

This is probably out of topic, but it's kinda funny how the Thais twisted the names of those countries.

France = Farang Set sounds like "France" in french.

Portugal = Portu-get, no idea why.

England = Angrid, from the word English. Because Thai have a problem with the "sh" sound at the end so it became a "D".

But back to Butterfly;

Thailand - Tai-guo. Tai- Free. Guo - land. Land of the Free. Exactly what Thailand means.

-Taison out

thanks oldman!

I wish jessica alba would teleport in front of me right now

Hm, if I'm not wrong, England can also be said as 'ying1 ge2 lan2', right?

Celest