ssb22 / CedPane

Chinese-English Dictionary Public-domain Additions for Names Etc (CedPane)
http://ssb22.user.srcf.net/cedpane/
The Unlicense
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Benjamin #49

Closed chinese-words-separator closed 1 year ago

chinese-words-separator commented 1 year ago

便雅明 便雅明 [Bian4 ya3 ming2] /Benjamin/

source: https://www.grimmstories.com/zh/grimm_tonghua/shier_xiongdi#:~:text=我叫便雅明

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ssb22 commented 1 year ago

Thanks. Not 100% sure about this one: that version of Benjamin seems to be rarely used outside of that particular Grimm fairytale translation, and it's not Benjamin here. I've added names from single stories before, but only if they're used in widespread fan discussion etc, because I assume words in copyrighted translations become public domain only if we can show they've entered general use (not just one-off use by one translator—although if that did become somehow OK then a lot of my remaining private entries could be added). 便雅明 is also used once here but the surrounding text uses 便雅悯 so 明 was probably a typo in that instance.

chinese-words-separator commented 1 year ago

便雅明 has 1.7K results only vs 81K results of 便雅悯

https://www.google.com/search?q="便雅明"

Perhaps some uses 便雅明 as 明 has more positive connotation and is easier to write and recall than 悯

ssb22 commented 1 year ago

That would seem logical. I'm not sure how Google gets its result counts, because sometimes it gives you a page that doesn't actually have the term you searched for on it even if you used quotes (perhaps there's some sort of approximation on some of their back-end servers). The first two pages of results are all either copies of the same 12 Brothers story (just copying it, not commenting on it or anything), or the false positive I mentioned earlier.

But on the third page, Google found it in Romans 11:1 of a scan of John C. Wu's Catholic translation of the New Testament. In that scan it's also 便雅明 at Philippians 3:5 and at Acts 13:21, but it's 伯雅明 at Revelation 7:8, so I'm suspecting it's an OCR'd scan. Well I don't have the paper copy to check, but at least the OCR said 便雅明 in 3 places out of 4, so it seems likely that John C. Wu did use 便雅明 so now we have it from 2 translators instead of just 1.

And then it's on this page referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (whose first name is normally translated 本亚明) so that makes 3. I think that's probably enough to put it in as a "less common" translation.