On Chinese character transliteration

So sashagee has pulled me back into Genshin Impact more because she needs help beating bosses, and I've moved on to Liyue, the China-themed region of the world. I'm playing with English text and Japanese speech, and one thing I immediately noticed was that all the names were different--the English text uses pinyin to render the Chinese names, but the Japanese speech doesn't--it transliterates them by character, not by sound, so many of the names sound very different.

Some examples:

• 北斗, Ch: Beidou, Jp: Hokuto, "Big Dipper."


• 甘雨, Ch: Ganyu, Jp: Kan'u, "Sweet Rain."


• 刻晴, Ch: Keqing, Jp: Kokusei, "Clear sky carver(?)"


• 凝光, Ch: Ningguang, Jp: Gyōkō, "Concentrated light" (though 凝 shikori in modern Japanese means "lump" or "muscle stiffness")


• 七七, Ch: Qiqi, Jp: Nana, "Seven-Seven"


• 云堇, Ch: Yun Jin, Jp: Unkin, "Violet [flower] Clouds"


• 行秋, Ch: Xingqiu, Jp: Yukuaki, "Into Autumn."


• 烟绯, Ch: Yanfei, Jp: Enhi, "Scarlet Smoke."


• 申鹤, Ch: Shenhe, Jp: Shinkaku, probably "Divine Crane" based on 申 being a homonym for 神.

I should have known this would be how it works, since I'm familiar with the Chinese classics and the same thing happens there--the monkey king is "Sun Wukong" in Chinese and "Son Gokū" in Japanese, Water Margin is "Shui Hu Zhuan" in Chinese, and "Suikoden" in Japanese (hence the games)--but for some reason I didn't expect to see it happen in recent titles!

Also because of this, none of those characters names sound like names to me. Maybe the posthumous Buddhist names of monks.

The funny part is that while looking these, up, I checked into a character I know exists but haven't met yet, 胡桃. This is "Hu Tao" in Chinese and the two characters taken together is a real modern Japanese word--it means walnut and is pronounced "Kurumi," which is also a real modern Japanese name. And maybe because of that, apparently in the Japanese dialogue it's pronounced "Fū Tao."