Writing a name in Chinese Characters

[rmg]

Setting: Near-future science fantasy. Even though it's a constructed setting, though, I'm representing the various languages with real-world languages (kind of like how Westron is "translated" into English in Tolkien's works except I'm lazy re: conglangs so I just did it for like every language in my setting), so you can just assume we're working

Comments

[tylik]

I'm not a native speaker, though I have been speaking Chinese for over twenty years now (not all of it particularly intensively). I suspect there might be other folks better positioned to answer this than I, but if you don't hear from someone, ping me and I'll see what I can come up with. (Or, for that matter, I might try anyway, just for fun, if I have time during a break today.)

One thing you might think about - when and where she was born, and her family background might have an impact. For instance, there were some very political (and sometimes pretty funny) named that got hung on kids during the Cultural Revolution.

[kys]

http://www.chinesetools.eu/chinesename/ : 奚静 (xiping) - still ; calm ; quiet ; not moving.
But may be the safest option is to contact one of the girls with this name and ask her.

[pico_the_great]

静 is jing!

[irottori]

There are indeed many possible combinations:
Common characters for Xi: 溪 (brook), 熙(light)，茜 (red, growth)，熹（light），希（hope)，习（to learn)，汐 (night tide)
Common characters for Ping: 萍 (floating water plant), 平（peace）

By the way, the word in kys comment should pronounce xijing instead of xiping.

[pico_the_great]

I'd go with 萍, mostly because people are over and over telling me how feminine the 艹 radical makes things. As for xi, though, yeah, s'up for anything. I might recommend googling around and seeing what's used with what.

[rmg]

Thanks for the help, irottori and pico! Googling around with some of those combinations showed that 熙萍 seemed to indicate that there were a reasonable number of women named that, and even though I said I didn't want a meaningful name, "light" is especially non-meaningful for this character, so I like it.