The Chinese word "柯林斯" is a direct phonetic transliteration of the English surname "Collins", formed by selecting Chinese characters whose pronunciations closely approximate the original English sounds: "柯" (kē) for "Col-", "林" (lín) for "-lin-", and "斯" (sī) for the final "-s". This is a standard method in Chinese for rendering foreign proper nouns, where the chosen characters are primarily for sound and carry no collective semantic meaning related to the original name, though each character individually has its own meaning (e.g., 柯 can mean "axe-handle", 林 "forest", and 斯 "this"). The term is most famously recognized in mainland China as the branded translation for "Collins" in the context of the widely used Collins English-Chinese Dictionary (《柯林斯英汉双解大词典》).