My name is Siobhan (pronounced Sh-vawn I guess) and I really can't figure out the best way to write it in Hangul. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Edit:
Thank you everyone for the help! the general consensus seems to be 셔반 so I'll be using that. It's been super interesting reading the discourse on different varieties based on the origin of the name, or whether I'm interested in pronunciation or spelling. I also have learned where I was lacking in my Hangul knowledge and why I couldn't translate my name before. Thanks again!
Once I met a lady named Chiffon. I thought she said Siobhan, so I asked, "Is that spelled the Irish way?" and she said, "No, the fabric way."
Korean here. I'd go with 셔반.
I looked up three “Siobhan”s on Wikipedia (Finneran, Donaghy, and Fahey) and looked at their Korean-language articles.
Two of them were 시오반
And one was 셔반
The 시오 ones are going purely off the spelling, not understanding how the name is actually pronounced. 셔 is correct.
Completely unrelated 시오반 sounds chinese kinda haha, like 손오반 from dragon ball
I guess the real question is, do you want the name translated to get Korean people to SPELL your name correctly (for example, you only need it for legal documents, not for actual conversational use), or do you want Korean people to SAY it correctly? If you only need it for documents, 시오반 will get them closer to the spelling of your name. If you want it to be spoken, I would go with 셔반. That will get most Koreans who see it to say “Shuh-Bawn.” You won’t get a ‘v’ sound because Korean just doesn’t have that. Any ‘v’ sound in foreign words typically gets changed to a ‘b’ sound in a Korean.
The spelling thing is completely pointless. A Sean doesn't spell his name 세안 in Korean and a Mathieu doesn't spell his name 맡히에우 in Korean even in official documents.
I mean, I do agree with you in general, especially if one is ever planning to interact with someone using their Korean name. But it looked like a lot of people had talked about both versions, so I thought I would clarify the stronger points of each spelling and explain why each might be useful. As another more obscure example, if you are an author selling a Korean translation of your book but never actually expect to visit Korea (but would like Korean people to be able to do an online search, so a closer spelling might be beneficial), I could see using the other spelling.
What? That makes no sense. That just doesn't happen.
셔반 sounds great. Do not use 시반 (as another commenter pointed out, too close for comfort to a swear word)
I like the idea of taking the meaning of your name, then finding appropriate Chinese character to match that meaning, rather than phonetically spelling it in hangul.
I just looked up the meaning, and it's derived from the same place as Joan, John, etc, meaning something like "God is gracious". Hmm. Korea is not a theistic culture, so this is a little tough. Maybe something like "bright grace" 명은.
주은 (주님의 은혜) also works and is closer in meaning but I guess also using it in that way might give evangelical vibes and probably doesn't match for catholic Ireland
And 주 has that whole vibe of owner, lord, husband. It would probably weird people out a bit. The two vowels next to each other are a bit tricky, too.
셔반
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셔반 is the closest. It's two syllables, not three. Just because you're taught one way doesn't make it the best solution. (I also deal with this problem when people transliterate my name, and it causes people to say my name incorrectly)
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There's no "오* sound because Siobhan isn't an English name. It's Irish Gaelic
Yes. Clearly that's the most important point.
Hopefully this helps... it's an Irish (Gaeilge) name not an English name, so it would not follow the English-to-Hangeul format. Irish Gaeilge (in English 'Gaelic' - pronounced gay-lik) and Gàidhlig (a Scottish language, confusingly also spelled 'Gaelic' in English, but pronounced gah-ick) have very VERY different spelling conventions despite using the same Roman alphabet.
Romanisation/hangulisation based on the Roman alphabet only really works (and even then with plenty of issues) if the word doesn't deviate too much from English spelling/pronunciation conventions. Otherwise the resulting hangeul sounds totally wrong - slainte mhath for example (the Scottish version of 'cheers') would be written 슬아인트 므핫 if assuming English pronunciation, but 슬란차 바 would be closer to the true pronunciation (slaancha vaa is roughly how it's pronounced in English).
People can be a bit sensitive about this because of the long history of English deliberately (including through deadly violence) suppressing/attempting to erase the Irish, Scottish and Welsh languages (and cultures/traditions). Not a perfect analogy, but I guess maybe the closest would be an English speaker trying to spell Korean names/words on the basis of Japanese romanisation -- it's not just that the end result sounds wrong, but for some people it also feels a bit like rubbing salt in the wound.
Oh yeah, that's a big mistake I made. I do know a bit about Irish history and English empire, but just forgot at the moment. Also, when I/we see words written with latin alphabet, I/we just consider it 'English' and try to pronounce it as English. It's what I/we need to work on to be better and fair to everyone. Thank you for pointing out and letting me learn.
Don't worry too much, with English being the global language I think everyone tends to default to that when trying to figure out how foreign words sound, it's normal... And of course native English speakers are the absolute worst for it! We can all do better, but no-one should expect us to know everything already when it comes to other languages, cultures and histories.
But I'm glad I could be helpful - it's really lovely to know someone from a completely different part of the world knows a bit of Irish history (and the horrors of the British Empire). If it's not intrusive, may I ask why/how come? Most English people know fairly little about the history, and are also pretty hopeless at spelling/pronunciation of celtic languages -- it's actually funny how some of my family's names have been pronounced(and they're pretty common/easy/well-known ones)! I also have a friend called Aoife (ee-fa / ee-fuh -- maybe 이퍼?) who lived in Korea about 20 years ago - English native speakers always totally butcher the pronunciation, and I suspect Koreans were actually much better at it!
Yea, it is. I tried using a Korean name translator and it was completely wrong lmao
슈반, 셔반 or 시반, though I’ll recommend against the last since it sounds like a swear word tbh
Wikipedia search tells me that it's a name of Irish origin. So I came up with all three spellings, one for English, and two for Irish (since Koreanization has its own set of rules depending on the languages).
English /ʃɪˈvɔːn/: ʃɪ: 시 + v: ㅂ + ɔ:ㅗ + n: ㄴ → 시본(sibon)
Irish /ˈʃʊwaːn̪ˠ/: ʃʊ:슈 + wa:와 + n̪ˠ:ㄴ → 슈완(syuwan)
Irish /ʃəˈwaːn̪ˠ/: ʃə:셔 + wa: 와 + n̪ˠ:ㄴ → 셔완(syeowan)
That being said, it seems that Siobhan is typically transcribed as 시오반(sioban) by Korean sources, which seems to be based on the spelling, rather than the pronunciation.
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(I'm writing the sentences below after I've went around Youtube and heard the pronunciations of Siobhan.)
It feels like I should transcribe it as 셔반(syeoban) even though the IPA in wikipedia tells me otherwise. If I could, I would have written it as something like 셔ᄫᅡᆫ(syeo-van)/셔ᄫᅪᆫ(syeo-vwan)/시ᄫᅡᆫ(si-van)/시ᄫᅪᆫ(si-vwan) but this spelling is no longer modern.
If you want the name to sound like a half-foreign half-Korean name, I would recommend '시본' as it would have a Hanja counterpart
I would go 쉬봔.