The Chinese word **巴比伦** (Bābǐlún) is a **phonetic loan translation** formed by selecting characters whose modern Mandarin pronunciations closely approximate the sounds of the foreign source word "Babylon." Each character—巴 (bā), 比 (bǐ), and 伦 (lún)—was chosen primarily for its sound, not its meaning, creating a multisyllabic compound that mimics the original name. This is a standard method in Chinese for transcribing foreign proper nouns, especially historical and geographical names, where the individual characters (which can mean things like "to hope," "to compare," and "ethics" in other contexts) collectively lose their semantic significance and serve purely as phonetic symbols.