The Chinese word "杰拉德" is a phonetic transliteration formed through a process of phonetic borrowing, where characters are selected solely for their sound and not their meaning to approximate the pronunciation of a foreign name or word. Each character—杰 (jié), 拉 (lā), and 德 (dé)—represents a syllable that collectively mimics the sound of the English name "Gerald," making it a standard example of how Mandarin creates equivalents for non-Chinese proper nouns by using a fixed set of common, phonetically suitable characters.