muckefuck | Let a hundred transcriptions bloom! (Reply)

After all this time spent focusing on ourselves and our dwellings, it was refreshing to get out into the world and see a few people I haven't for a while. One of them is a librarian at DePaul who is preparing for an upcoming trip to China.

monshu and I promised to share our tips on what to see in Beijing (such as they are) and I volunteered to help design name cards suitable for handing out to strangers. I figured nothing fancy--just a transcription of his name accompanied by identification of his institution. Easy-peasy, right? I mean, DePaul University's not the biggest and most famous college in Chicago, but you'd still figure that it would have a standardised Chinese version of its name.

"Ha!" I say. Here's what I've collected so far:

德堡大學 (152,000 Ghits)
德保爾大學 (5,180)
德保羅大學 (4,580 Ghits)
Depaul大學 (4,030)
帝博大學 (2,940 Ghits)
帝寶大學 (237 Ghits)

So in this horse race, it's "Virtue Castle" ahead by a mile, followed by "Virtue Defends You" neck-and-neck with "Virtue Defends Gauze" and "Depaul", then "Emperor Is Learned" with "Imperial Treasure" bringing up the rear. 德堡大學 seems like the obvious choice, but I was hoping to find some indication that it has the imprimatur of the institution itself. How parochial is it that a school with hundreds of Chinese students, a respected Chinese programme, and a campus in Hong Kong only offers an English-language version of its website?