The Chinese word "塔利班" is formed through phonetic transliteration, where each character is selected solely for its sound to approximate the pronunciation of the English word "Taliban". The character "塔" (tǎ) corresponds to "Ta", "利" (lì) to "li", and "班" (bān) to "ban", creating a sequence that mimics the original word's syllables without conveying meaningful semantic content from the characters themselves.