The Chinese word **印第安纳** (Yìndì'ānnà) is a **phonetic loan translation** formed to represent the sound of the English place name "Indiana." It is constructed by selecting Chinese characters whose pronunciations approximate the English syllables: *Yìn* for "In," *dì* for "di," *ān* for "a," and *nà* for "na." This is a standard method in Chinese for transcribing foreign proper nouns, particularly place names, where the chosen characters carry little to no semantic relation to the original meaning (which is "Land of the Indians") and serve primarily as phonetic vessels.