The Chinese phonetically translate English names by finding characters that sound like each syllable. It can be an arbitrary process and could be problematic when translating the names of American presidential candidates for the 2008 ballot. But Boston shouldn’t have to worry about that now that a panel of federal judges denied a move by the US Justice Department to require this.

The following are the translations provided by Sampan, a bilingual Chinese-English newspaper in New England. The possible meanings of the characters come from "A Chinese-English Dictionary," published by the Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press in Beijing.