So, just working on a plot of sorts for an RP I'm planning, when I relised how inconvienient it would be for a person to sign up to RRR and be all "Hey, you do know 'this' means Donkey Fist in 'this' language?" quite frankly, I'd rather not know what Donkey Fist is, or what it might translate into.

So anyway, where do your characters or races name come from?
Do you break down words in other languages and mix them with other words?
Or do you take the risky route and make them up, hoping for no one to try to translate it?

Personally, I take the risky route and hope people can pronounce it.
Its what I did with the World of Alsta races, although some of the town names like Welstarm and Denmarie kind of sound like other words and maybe that kind of little village in the England country side that you think would be a peaceful place to live.

Risky route. Although i usually get small references to mythologic names or other similar references (Or just plain take the name from somewhere else if it's a modern thing)

By example, on my Persona RP, Fukuoka High is an actual High School in Japan, i just googled Japanese Schools and that was one of the first that showed up.

Akriloth - taken directly from an online browser game called Adventure Quest.

Lars Olimar - Last name taken from the game Pikmin

Nityiorasu Ozu - My name in Harakhana

My favourite two techniques are anagrams and what it is in a different language. Like my game has a species which is a polymorph of a lion and a snake, so I call it a Slikken. I made it from S L I K E N N, then changed it in order to improve pronouncability. Also, I like the word mundo from spanish, so I like to use that as a place. Incidentally, the game revolves around the events at mundo, so it helps it out even more.

And you don't want to know what donkey punching is. Definetely.

I SOMETIMES break down English words, often to the point that it's nearly impossible for anyone but me to know what the words were.

Auramute, is one of the ones that somebody COULD tell what the words are: Aura, and Mutant. It's called that, because it's a mutant with an aura of radiation coming off their skin. See what I did there?

Although I MAINLY just roll sounds around my mouth, to find something that sounds cool, and also typical of the "Culture" of the world.

In one of my old RPGs, the Continent was called Zaghalla (Za-ka-la). One example of a Race was the Quizeol Fatta, which meant "Feral Elf" (Yeah, I took nerdy to the extreme and created a few words of their language ). Where did the nam come from? I dunno xD
It just sounded kind of.... "Right".

So I mostly just mess around with sounds that sound customary of th world that the race is set in., though I sometimes get lazy and break down English words.

Another example was one of my attempted "novels" (It WILL be published some day! ), where the world was called Baranouse
(Barren-oose), and all of the names there were kind of posh, ye olde England style names. Why? Because I thought the word Baranouse sounded kind of posh in a way, so the culture there was also posh: thus, the names were posh. Again, this was a matter of messing sounds around. I mainly do this because it's fast, efficient, and I can't be bothered to translate words from other languages xD

yeah i normaly just spout verbal diarriea untill i find a name i like though when im really stuck ill turn a word into jappanese or some other landguage

i normally use my latin skills and use words that describe the character, land, name of something in latin, and it usually sounds great. Fair enough some words sound a bit boring or obvious, but then you can just manipulate then or just completely choose another word all together.