Most transliteration is clerical. You need a syllable, you take a character that carries it, you move on. Occasionally somebody refuses to move on.
Four characters that catch the French well enough, and which simultaneously describe a place with a forest in it. The name does two jobs. Nothing required it to do the second one.
翡冷翠
The other famous one is Florence, and it has an author. 翡冷翠 — jadeite, cold, emerald — was Xu Zhimo’s, written in 1925. He was rendering Firenze, the Italian, not the English Florence, which is why it begins with an f sound and ends where the Italian ends.
It didn’t win. The standard name is 佛羅倫斯, from English Florence, and it is fine and means nothing. But 翡冷翠 survives the way a good line survives — quoted, recognised, occasionally used by people who want you to know they know.
Two greens and a cold in the middle, for a city of green-and-white marble in a cold river valley. He was showing off. He was entitled to.
The rule this breaks
Everywhere else on this site the pattern is that meaning leaks into transliteration by accident — orchids across northern Europe, a flattering syllable chosen over an unflattering one. The translator is solving for sound and the meaning arrives uninvited.
These two are the opposite: someone solved for meaning and let the sound come along. That is the difference between a convention and a poem, and there are only a handful of the latter on the whole world map.