The word "阿根廷" is formed through a process of phonetic translation, where the sounds of the foreign name "Argentina" are approximated using Chinese characters that mimic those syllables. The characters 阿 (ā), 根 (gēn), and 廷 (tíng) were chosen not for their meanings, but primarily because their combined pronunciation closely resembles "Argentina", following the common Chinese convention for rendering foreign proper nouns into a standard three-character format.