About
Cathay Ink is one person and one rule: a Chinese name should be a name a Chinese person could actually have. The names are proposed by an AI language model working inside rules I wrote, and the calligraphy is painted by an AI image model; I set the rules and I answer the email.
Who I am
I'm Jessica. I grew up with Chinese as my first language and English as my working one, and for years the English-speaking friends around me kept asking for "their name in Chinese". What they had been given before was almost always a transliteration: characters picked for sound, which no Chinese reader would take for a person's name. That is the gap this site closes.
Why a transliteration is not a name
艾玛 says "Emma" out loud, but it means nothing and reads as foreign. A real Chinese name has a family name from the hundred surnames and a given name of one or two characters chosen for meaning, sound and the way they sit together. 严雅, Yán Yǎ, "elegant and composed", is a name; it could belong to a classmate. That difference is the whole product.
How a name is chosen
Three candidates are proposed by a language model working inside rules I set, the rules a Chinese parent would use: common characters, no awkward homophones, nothing that reads as a word or a brand. Every candidate is then scored by a second, independent model calibrated on names labelled by native speakers, and anything below the bar is never shown. The free name checker will read any name back to you the way a native speaker would. No name is kept, sold or reused.
How the pieces are made
The calligraphy is generated by an image model from the chosen characters, in the four scripts a trained hand would write: running, cursive, clerical and seal. The seals are set in a seal-script typeface and the certificate of meaning lists each character with its reading and sense, so your artist or any Chinese friend can confirm it. The files are yours to print, frame or ink.
What I ask of you
Show the name to a Chinese friend before it goes on skin. Write to me if a character looks wrong; a free revision is part of every pack. And if the name makes you smile when you say it, tell me, that is the part I do this for.