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Seeking a list of several foreign words (usually names, but any noun) that have been borrowed from other languages, but originally transliterated/pronounced incorrectly and are now being improved into a closer approximation of the original.

I used to be able to rattle off four or five such examples, but have forgotten most.

Examples:

  • Peking (now corrected to Beijing)
  • Mao Tse-tung (now corrected to Mao Zedung)
  • Bombay (now corrected to Mumbai)

Note:
Modified the question to replace "~correction" with "~improvement", as suggested in comments.

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    Not an answer but a qualification. Peking was a 'romanisation' of how Beijing was pronounced in southern provinces of China (which itself reflected an older pronunciation of the name), so was not 'spelled/pronounced' incorrectly. The name Peking was used by the Qing Dynasty and for decades by the People's Republic of China as its standard 'postal map romanisation'. Beijing is a romanisation of the Standard Mandarin pronunciation. Bombay is arguably not a mistransliteration of Mumbai, but a name arising from Old Portugese 'bom baim' (good little bay).
    – fred2
    Commented Sep 27, 2013 at 17:26
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    @fred2: the Portuguese clearly came from the original "Mumbai" ... it wasn't quite a mistranslation, but the native name was replaced by a similar name which meant something in Portuguese. There are other similar cases, like the "Fish-a-whack" river in New Jersey (now called the "Passaic", which is closer to the original Indian name), and the Niger river in Africa (named by the Romans ... it means "black" in Latin, but I believe it was also similar to the name the natives used).
    – Peter Shor
    Commented Sep 27, 2013 at 17:34
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    I'm still waiting for Texas and Los Angeles to be transliterated such that they are pronounced correctly. Seriously though, any transliteration is always an approximation (since we simply don't have all the sounds), and in fact any written word is (since spoken word is primary). I don't know that Bejing is an improvement over Peking — whichever I use it's nowhere close to what the Chinese actually say, so we might as well call it Susan. I'd reserve "wrong" and "improvement" for things such as turning Beautiful Square into "Red Square".
    – RegDwigнt
    Commented Sep 27, 2013 at 18:02
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    Maybe czar corrected to tsar, as seen in a recent question here.
    – GEdgar
    Commented Sep 27, 2013 at 18:07
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    One more point. Transliteration, unlike spelling in general, is actually pretty standardized. It's just that everybody uses their own "standard", and when to use which is often decided by politicians, not linguists. I used to have an "iou" in my family name. Then the authorities suddenly decided that they no longer liked the so-called "French transliteration", so millions had to get new passports, and the romanized name in mine is now spelled with a "yu". It's been 15 years, but I still often misspell my own signature. (Needless to say, neither spelling reflects the actual pronunciation.)
    – RegDwigнt
    Commented Sep 27, 2013 at 18:08

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In all of this it depends what you mean by correct. I recall that in the Peking v Beijing case the differing systems of Romanisation played a part. I don't really see why cities' names have to be pronounced, or even spelled the way that the citizens spell or pronounce them. The French do not say 'London', but 'Londres'. Equally we do not say Paree but Paris! If this ridiculous idea persists you will have to start pronouncing all the American place names as they are pronounced in their original languages - Nouveau Orleans (pronounced OR LEY ON) or New York (without the rotic R).

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    As I understand it Peking is the exact equivalent of Londres -the Wade-Giles transliteration make it possible for westerners to pronounce Chinese approximately correctly, but Pinyin makes it possible for those who know Chinese to write it in roman characters. No prizes for guessing which the Chinese government prefers, but that doesn't mean one is 'an improvement'.
    – Tim Lymington
    Commented Sep 27, 2013 at 21:33

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