English became the lingua franca of the world. In essence, it's a phonetic language. By contrast, Chinese is a symbolic language. So the translation of some Chinese words into English can be funny.

A real-life example happened in a Montreal office with a Chinese whose last name is 缪 (spelled commonly as "Miao" in English and pronounced as /'miau/, according to the pronunciation of the original Chinese word). So when one vocal Western colleague of hers learned that her family name is such, the female co-worker uttered "oh my God, her name is Meow" (In English, "meow" means the crying sound made by a cat).

:-)