The Chinese word "杰夫" is formed through a process of phonetic transliteration, specifically designed to approximate the sounds of a foreign name, such as "Jeff". Each character is selected based on its pronunciation in Mandarin: "杰" (jié) mimics the "Je" sound, and "夫" (fū) corresponds to the "ff" or "fu" sound, together creating a close auditory match to the original name. This construction relies solely on the sonic resemblance between the characters and the foreign syllables, without conveying any semantic meaning from the characters themselves, which is a standard approach for adopting personal names into Chinese.