The Chinese word "麦当娜" is formed by phonetically transliterating the English name "Madonna", with each character representing a syllable: "麦" (mài) for "Ma", "当" (dāng) for "don", and "娜" (nà) for "na". The characters are chosen solely for their sound to approximate the original pronunciation, resulting in a loanword where the individual meanings of the characters are irrelevant to the reference.