The Chinese word 奥克兰 is formed through phonetic transliteration, where each character represents a syllable of the English name "Auckland": 奥 (ào) approximates "Au", 克 (kè) approximates "ck", and 兰 (lán) approximates "land". The characters are selected solely for their sound to mimic the foreign pronunciation, resulting in the compound word 奥克兰.