[CWuestefeld]

Except for more modern words. For example, the word(s) for email that my wife uses is a transliteration of the English sounds, resulting in something like "Ee-may-are".

Also, Chinese translations for non-Chinese places and people are frequently impossible to decipher. My wife frequently looks up from her Chinese news paper and says "this article talks about a person named 'blah blah'; who do you think it is?". Americans sometimes insensitively change foreign terms (e.g., "Beijing" becomes "Peking"; "Torino" becomes "Turin"). But the Chinese system absolutely forces them to do this, because of the limited set of syllables the can write. In Mandarin, the only consonant sound you can have at the end of a syllable is "n" or "ng", so if you need a sound other than that you've got to either drop it or add in an extra syllable having that consonant at its beginning.

[johkra]

German for instance, uses Peking and Turin, too.

I don't know about Peking, but Turin is actually the name in the local dialect. Torino is proper Italian. [1] My guess is that Turin is the older name which got established in the English and German language and it was later changed to the proper Italian name Torino.

[1] Both mean "bull" in English, there was something about bull (taur...) already in the name when it was founded by the romans.

[hugh3]

Americans sometimes insensitively change foreign terms (e.g., "Beijing" becomes "Peking"; "Torino" becomes "Turin").

For what it's worth, Peking and Turin were both fixed in the English language long before there was an America. And if the Italians want to complain about the "insensitive" Anglicisations of their city names they can go complain to Elisabetta II herself in Londra, Inghilterra.