Comments from Deborah Ng about the translation

It was the most challenging to translate Alderley Edge into Cantonese Chinese because there isn’t an official or popularised translation available (at least there wasn’t a Chinese Wikipedia article about it).

Since the first part of the village name “Alderley” sounds like an Anglolised name, I decided to approach it via phonological translation, which takes the sound of the word to be recreated in the target language as close as possible. The result is “ 艾特利”, which in fairness may not be the best result since I never heard locals’ pronunciation of the name yet. This is the same approach used for translating the Cantonese word for Derby “打比” - which, on an interesting note, it is written differently to the Mandarin variation of the translation “德比” due to difference in dialects. It is very common to see Cantonese and Mandarin translations to differ, which is best seen from literature and movies translations. Depending on the dialectical and political region, there may have different approach to the translation no matter how close their dialect may sound like (eg movies released in the Mainland China have different translations to the releases in Taiwan.)

Here comes the challenging part - I strongly considered discarding the “Edge” bit from my translation because the outcome 艾特利 is already a memorable name, but then I found out that the edge is a landscape attraction to the village. Having it included in the village name probably implies its role in the village’s local identity. I don’t want to strip that away from my translation so I decided to retain it. Apparently the Edge is an escarpment, which is translated as 斷崖 in Chinese. But that doesn’t sound very nice so I used a softer word 邊 to represent the idea of the border and the edge, to replace the word 斷 which has a meaning of break and broken. Chinese naming of a place values how nice it sounds especially with prestigious and foreign places because folk practices value the impact of environments to fortune (like ideas of Feng Shui). However there are rare exceptions that can sound pretty vulgar.