this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023
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Chinese Wikipedia says you meant 卡尔·马克思
But in any case, yes, foreign names have to be sounded out in some way no matter what language
I mean theoretically if a logographic orthography for western languages existed like it does for Japanese there would be no need for phonetic translation.
Did you get your terms mixed up? Japanese uses katakana for foreign transcription which is a perfectly phonetic alphabet.
Japanese use Kanji for things like names. Which makes translating Japanese names into Chinese much easier.
Sure but plenty of people do have given names in kana