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Hah. They do pose some unique challenges for native English speakers. Can't say I've looked at Japanese but with Mandarin, there is (some) vocabulary that is slightly transparent, like 卡尔吗克思。 I remember really puzzling over that one in an article about an airport until I sounded it out. But you're right, the advantage for English speakers is significantly greater for Indo-European and especially Romance/Germanic languages.
(For anyone interested in the characters above)
If I'm right, they mean Karl Marx. In pinyin, Kǎ'ěr mǎkèsī.
卡尔吗克思
Chinese Wikipedia says you meant 卡尔·马克思
But in any case, yes, foreign names have to be sounded out in some way no matter what language
I mean theoretically if a logographic orthography for western languages existed like it does for Japanese there would be no need for phonetic translation.
Did you get your terms mixed up? Japanese uses katakana for foreign transcription which is a perfectly phonetic alphabet.
Japanese use Kanji for things like names. Which makes translating Japanese names into Chinese much easier.
Sure but plenty of people do have given names in kana