大家好！

I would like to ask whether you could come up with an alternative character for my current surname. My name at the moment is 欧立文, but I am unfortunately not very fond of the character for ou. My surname is Simon, given name is Oliver. Could you please create a name for me which you think sounds great? Also, for li I thought about rather using 李. If you have a very different idea, please let me know.

Thank you so much.

After consulting my walking dictionary/girlfriend. Let me ask first why you don't like 欧 for your surname? If its for aesthetic reasons, what if you wrote your name in traditional using 歐 instead, which I think looks much cooler and people will be impressed you can write traditional, as they can't(mostly). Perhaps you dislike the sound 'ou' and would prefer to use 'ao' which wouldn't be as close to your name? Also 李 would be strange in a given name. I suggest 里 as a better usage。 Also instead of 'wen' maybe 'fo' would be a closer sound to your name.

Personally, I wouldn't pick your name based on a close sound to English. You have to consider what people will call you with that name. Anyone you are familiar with will only call you 立文 for instance.
Also 立文 has a feminine sound to it. So your formal name in Chinese will be your casual name in English, and your casual name in Chinese will just be the equivalent of 'liver'.

Thanks a lot for your reply!

Sorry, I forgot to mention why I don't like the ou. It is indeed solely for aesthetic reasons - I don't like the character very much. The sound is good. Actually I first learned traditional characters, I mostly write it traditionally. Still it's not one of my favorite characters.

I like the sound of liwen quite a lot. I actually like liwen much more than lifo. Not too happy about the feminine sound to it, though.

Maybe an end with "fei" would be good?

It sounds most close to your name, is used in names (for example 王菲 - though it's a womam, so maybe fei is also feminine; wait a sec, there's 米芾, so not necessarily girlish) and you can have 文 hidden in it (as for 斐) :P

My given name is also Oliver, when I first lived in China (back in '03) I was volunteering for a charity, a Chinese literature professor attached to the charity came up with the name 洪英豪. Obviously nothing to do with the sound of my name: the 洪 is for the name of the town that I was living in at the time: 泗洪 then 英 because I'm British (英国) and 豪 because there were 2 of us volunteering - 洪英豪 & 洪英杰 (豪杰)

When I moved to Shanghai to work full time in 2008 I decided to keep the name that was given to me as it has meaning to me. It's amazing how great an ice breaker an unusual name (actually more common as it's actually a Chinese name and not just a transliteration)with a story can be.

I guess my point is that you don't always have to stick with a transliteration of your name...

谢谢你们