How many names do you have?!

I WAS asked this by a fellow course-mate when I did the CELTA. He's American so due to laziness I didn't bother to explain it. But when a Filipino staff in Japan dealing with my visa application was confused by the whole "Chinese" name thing and with Lilly ちゃん commenting on it in my first post, I feel compelled to write about this. Believe it or not, most Singaporeans get the concept of Chinese & English names wrong.

I shall use multilingual entertainer Kaneshiro Takeshi (金城 武) to elaborate this. If you read his name in Chinese, it is pronounced Jin Cheng Wu. As with most Chinese and Japanese names, there are meanings to each name. But the meanings only make sense if you read or say it in Chinese or Japanese. However, if you transliterate and write in English it becomes - Kaneshiro Takeshi / Jin Cheng Wu. It has no meaning. Because in the end, when you say it, it is still Japanese / Chinese - depending on how you want to read those characters. This is where most people get confused because they call it "English translation".

No, it is not a translation. A translation means only if you translate the meaning of your name into English. 

My Chinese is horrid, so I'm gonna be making terrible guesses to the meaning of 金城武 in Chinese.
For example, his name means strong analyst. He doesn't go round introducing himself as, "Hi, I'm Strong Analyst."

So as with all Chinese and Japanese names, and I believe as with most names in languages other than English, we transliterate it rather than translate it.

How does my baptism name come about then? I'm not a Catholic by birth, so none of my relatives nor my parents are Catholics. So baptism names are usually the typical names we see in English like Grace, Kelly, Mary, John etc...

Not all regular names we see in English are modeled after a saint though. So when we choose to be baptised, most of us will choose a saint's name to hopefully have the courage to lead a similar kind of spiritual life.

The reason behind the whole name issue for my visa application was I stopped using the transliteration of my Chinese name because I found out it wasn't given to me by my parents nor any members of my extended family and there was no meaning to the name even in Chinese. I don't see a reason to retain it however I couldn't get rid of it because it will affect insurance coverage etc etc... Too much hassle. So most of my newer, recent documents only had my baptism name. The first name was given to me by my aunt from birth, the middle name was chosen by me.

Personally, I feel it is important to have a Chinese name written in Chinese and leave it as it is, rather than to transliterate it. It creates dual identities but hey, don't we all have split personalities? That's what makes humans interesting I think.

*Picture sourced from Google Images.