Most of us must have come across the riddle: What belongs to you but is used by others? The answer surely is your name. From the riddle, we see the importance of one's name in identifying a person. Before a conversation starts, people will always exchange each other's names or name cards.
Chinese names have covered its way of historic evolution as long as over four thousand years. At first, our ancestors only had given names without any surnames. Later, in matriarchal society, people were separated by consanguinity into clans. To distinguish these clans, they gave each clan a name according to their totem or the place they resided in. And these clan names become surnames at last.
Usually a surname is of one character, for example: 赵 (Zhao), 孙 (Sun), 李 (Li). Yet there do exist surnames of two characters, like 上官 (Shangguan), 欧阳 (Ouyang),etc. In recent years, there is a trend in China to use both of the parents' surnames as their children's names. One of my classmates is called 陈刘明 (Chen Liuming),which indicates her father's surname is 陈 (Chen),her mother's 刘 (Liu) and 明 (ming) her given name. A Chinese given name may comprise one character or two. However, the Chinese surname is the first name while the given name is the last name, contrary to English readers' expectations.
Chinese given names usually consist of two syllables (though it is increasingly common to only use one). Those syllables can be any of the thousands of Chinese characters so the combinations are almost limitless. In practice some characters are chosen more often than others, such as Mei "beautiful" for girls. Sometimes the first character of the given name is shared by all members of a generation in a family (siblings, cousins, etc)
In ancient China , besides a given name, a man also had a courtesy name. The given name is used by the person himself to show modesty and by those superior to or older than him while the courtesy name by those inferior to or younger than him to show their respect to the addressee. In addition, he might also have an alternative name, a nickname, an assumed name, a style name, a pseudonym, a business name, a Buddhist name, an official title or even a temple title after his death.
Nowadays, most Chinese just have one name. They do not have literary names or styles any more. Therefore, the translation is much easier now.
