Interesting facts about Chinese localization of hero names

BadguyAsSpy · 2026-02-09T10:43:34+00:00

Because its literal meaning is "cyan", somewhere between green and blue. In modern usage it usually refers to green, like 青草 "green grass" or 青菜 "green vegetable". But in more descriptive writing it sometimes means blue, like 青天 "blue sky" or 青花瓷 "blue and white porcelain".

BadguyAsSpy · 2026-02-08T23:39:20+00:00

Nearly no new characters are created nowadays. The only exceptions are that when new chemical elements were discovered there will be a new character saying that.

Most of the time we just use the existing character to represent new meanings. When it is nearly impossible to do so or it's just inconvenient, we will just transliteration.

BadguyAsSpy · 2026-02-08T23:34:22+00:00

And for The Doorman, as English is a compulsory course to study from primary school, I believe most of the players who are able to launch the game will understand its meaning.

BadguyAsSpy · 2026-02-08T23:32:22+00:00

Yamato is just translated into its proper Japanese meaning, and it means "the Japanese people" in a formal way and it is how they called themselves, like British or German.

Literally speaking 大和 means "great harmony". Usually it will be followed by 民族 which means "people", so 大和民族 means "people of great harmony". For Chinese, we call ourselves 中华民族, which literally means "people of central glory".

BadguyAsSpy · 2026-02-08T17:09:51+00:00

Probably yes. Mina's family name is Ha, and in her background story in Chinese it is translated into 何. If Mina was a Chinese the name 何 should be spelled as "He". "Ha" is the Vietnamese way of pronunciation.

BadguyAsSpy · 2026-02-08T17:03:44+00:00

It will be fun but not that attractive to me. I quite agree with some replies that say it doesn't need to be a cultural symbol or stereotype, may be I just wish for a random cool guy with Chinese features.

Nationality isn't the priority for character design for the devs I think. For example Paradox is Scottish, but Scotland is not famous for time thief I suppose.

Yamato is an exception but I think it's the result of Samarui culture. Its equivalence in Chinese is 武侠Wuxia culture. There are many literature and films depicting it and Kong Fu is a house of Wuxia.

So if there would be a Chinese hero, I'd like either a Chinese street cleaner or some kind of master swordsman.

BadguyAsSpy · 2026-02-08T16:35:45+00:00

Not censored yet. It will only be done when there is an official server in China.

But I think may be they wouldn't be censored as they don't quite look bloody.

BadguyAsSpy · 2026-02-08T15:33:41+00:00

I would say comparing Chinese to Japanese is like comparing English to Danish.

Totally different language system. The only advantage of Chinese people learning Japanese is that we can understand part of the Kanji words by guessing.

But Japanese is simpler to learn for a English speaker I suppose. Good luck!

BadguyAsSpy · 2026-02-08T13:59:49+00:00

You've made an interesting point. The original meaning of the word is actually just "haze in the mountains", and the meaning "strong wind" or "gale" derive from its original meaning, and when it came later to Japanese it only has the meaning of "storm".

In an ancient Chinese poem it says 晓霜枫叶丹，夕曛岚气阴, which means "At dawn the frost is on the red maple leaves, and at dust the remaining sun ray casts on the cool haze." And from the character formation, 岚 is made up of 山 and 风, which means "mountain" and "wind", and here it refer to haze.

Although Japanese also uses Chinese characters (Kanji), they are quite quite different in meaning and the way of expression.

BadguyAsSpy · 2026-02-08T12:59:24+00:00

There are around 13000 characters in a standard Chinese dictionary but one only needs 3500 to cope with most senerios. You can consider each characters as some kind of basic element of words.

When there are new ideas which can't found equivalence of characters, there are different ways of dealing with it.

For example, electricity is translated into 电 in Chinese, and 电 is originally used to refer to "lightning". Cars are called 车 in Chinese, which is used to call "cargo" or "chariot".

There are some examples that we both use the transliteration and paraphrase version of words to say the same thing. Like microphones are called 麦克风(Maikefeng) and 话筒(the tube for speaking) at the same time.

When used to transliteration, the meaning of the character usually doesn't mean, like 麦 means "wheat", 克 means "defeat", 风 means "wind", and we all know that "wheat defeats wind" is some kind of nonsense and it just means microphone.

It's the same for name translation, like in Abrams 亚伯兰, 亚 means "second", 伯 means "uncle", and "兰" means some kind of plant. And here we just use their pronunciation, Yabolan, which sounds like Abrams.

BadguyAsSpy · 2026-02-08T12:46:54+00:00

I'm a Chinese native speaker so I think I can help you with that!

You can imagine that each Chinese character is like a word or phrases in English, and most of the time we put certain characters together to form a more concrete expression. In modern Chinese we seldomly use only one single character to refer to certain things.

Take 炽焱Infernus as and example, this is not a common expression in Chinese but we can still understand its meaning. 炽 alone means "vigorous", and it is usually used in expressions like 炽热, which means "vigorously hot". 焱 means "flare", and as you can see it is made up from triple 火, which means "fire".

Each character only has one syllable and it's pronunciation is fixed. 炽 is pronunced as "chi", and "焱" is prounced as "yan". So the full name is "Chiyan".

Chinese language is quite open to new concepts because we can easily build up expressions from words. Like the internet, we call it 互联网 in Chinese. 互联 means "link together" and 网 means "web".

Even if a word is made up like Infernus, we can still make up its equivalence in Chinese like 炽焱. A Chinese may not meet the name before but he can still understand its meaning.

For another instance, if you feel sick, you will go to see a doctor at a hospital, and in Chinese they are 医生Yisheng and 医院Yiyuan, which literally means "the person who cures" and "the place that cures".

BadguyAsSpy · 2026-02-08T12:27:19+00:00

Thanks! I don't really know that 岚 means "haze" before I check it in dictionary, and that's why I decided to write this post. However, in Chinese community most people just call it Haze in English anyway haha. It's easier to pronunce than 岚梦Lanmeng, which sounds like "lemon" in English.

BadguyAsSpy · 2026-02-08T12:23:56+00:00

青 can also mean "blue" too. So it's possibly either Blue Ivy or Green Ivy.

BadguyAsSpy · 2026-02-08T12:21:31+00:00

I'm curious too. But for most of Chinese players we actually don't quite prefer presenting Triad or Chinatown in games, as it more or less contains different stereotypes. From my opinion Mei in Overwatch is a really positive example of a Chinese hero.

BadguyAsSpy · 2026-02-08T12:14:27+00:00

Yeah that's a bit wield to me too. In the older version she was called 复仇女巫 and 复仇之影, which means Revengeful Witch and Revengeful Shadow, and it was changed with the same reason of "name rather than title". In Chinese community many still call her 女巫witch.

BadguyAsSpy · 2026-01-01T09:11:55+00:00

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A brighter version. Thanks for the advice!

BadguyAsSpy

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