Usually the name of the nation is based on a specific quality of the nation or a translation of the name that they have. For example the name in Japanese for Japan is Nippon which means "Sun's Origin" the name for it in Chinese is 日本 (Rìbĕn) which also means Sun's origin, now Europe traded more with China than Japan so they asked "What is the name of those Islands to the East?" They said "哪个是日本。" (That is the Sun's Origin) So the Italian traders came back and pronounced RìBĕn as Shippan, which the English speakers heard as Japan.

Generally speaking the closer in root languages and more phenotypes the two languages have in common the closer the names will be together. Additionally the more modern the country's founding the more likely that they are to be similar. It should be noted however that changing a language can be seen as a political statement.

It's basically one of two (or two and a half) ways.

1 - The name the country calls itself in its language is spread around and changes in spelling and pronunciation occur as it shifts between languages, but there is still the "root" of that name in that "home" language. Remember, a lot of place names came about before modern communications.

2 - The name is attributed because of some real or perceived characteristic of the country and some term is coined in another country to refer to the people and place of the other country.

2.5 - A name from 2 is then spread around to other countries and languages, kinda like in 1.

In addition to the above translation issues and playing telephone, I'd like to take this opportunity to quote terry pratchett, who has a quote for every situation.

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The forest of Skund was indeed enchanted, which was nothing unusual on the Disc, and was also the only forest in the whole universe to be called – in the local language – Your Finger You Fool, which was the literal meaning of the word Skund. The reason for this is regrettably all too common. When the first explorers from the warm lands around the Circle Sea travelled into the chilly hinterland, they filled in the blank spaces on their maps by grabbing the nearest native, pointing at some distant landmark, speaking very clearly in a loud voice, and writing down whatever the bemused man told them. Thus were immortalised in generations of atlases such geographical oddities as Just A Mountain, I Don’t Know, What? and, of course, Your Finger You Fool.

The British called the capital of China "Peking" when they forced trade onto China, and it remained Peking in the west for a long time. In 1979, China requested that the west pronounce it a more accurate "Beijing", and it has continued since then.

When Alexander the Great took over Egypt, the people from that country called themselves "Kemet" (or something like that). The way we pronounce Egypt is a rough translation from the Greek.

Well usually they just don't. Most common origin for country names is "we heard that our neighbour call it this way so we just accepted it" and "they wrote their name down but we are not sure how to pronounce it so we will just guess"

There is no They making up languages. They didn’t come up with words for countries. They are not deciding how to spell words, or making up grammar rules. They is just the users of the language doing what they can to share meaning.

Sometimes it is after the tribe or area in the country that was the most familiar/closest to the country naming it. Like Germany being called 'Saksa' in Finnish because of the contact to the Saxons.

In Polish, the name for Italy is related to the word hair, and the name for Germany is derived from niemi ludzie, which translates to people of unintelligible speech.

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Japan in japanese is Nihon.

The origin of why we call it Japan comes from Marco Polo who heard the chinese call it 日本 (Riben), pronounced as Zu-Pang, which translate losely to « the sun’s origin », as Japan is west of China and Japan is where the sun rise first.

I really wish that we could get rid of this silliness. If I as an English speaker say "Deutschland" or "ParEE" (Paris) people look at me strangely, but those are the actual names as spoken by the locals. At least with Beijing, the Chinese Government corrected how it was translated into English, to give a pronunciation that is closer to the actual Chinese pronunciation, than the old "Peking".

New Zealand was named by Dutch explorers who “found” the country - and named it after the Zeeland region in the Netherlands. It was “Nova Zeelandia”. Māori named their country Aotearoa meaning “land of the long white cloud”. It’s often called “Aotearoa New Zealand” as one now.

A lot of country names is just a variation of 'Our Land/The Land'. So what do you call another place when that's what you call yours? You have to use a different name than what they call themselves.

Sometimes it's when people came and asked 'what is this place?' and the people there said 'I don't understand'. So now that's the name of the place (Yucatan).

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Phonetics, at least in Ireland the names of places and people in English are just phonetic gibberish that sounds broadly like the Irish words which actually mean something

There's tons of ways it can happen really. For starters in many cases a country's "global" name, in English or other languages, is dictated by the country itself and is just the native name of the country. For example Turkey recently demanded that it is referred to as Turkiye because they didn't like the fact that the name was the same as the bird. At least in all official diplomatic/academic/informational contexts, this has to be observed.

Some countries are named after their people, who had names as loosely defined ethnic groups long before modern day countries and borders were a thing (France/Britain/Germany for example).

Some times a country may have multiple different names in multiple different languages. It really depends where each language "got it from". Depending on various cultural and historical contexts a language may take a country's name and other words as loanwords from another language that introduced them to it. For example the Romans and Greeks were well travelled peoples, or held vast territories, and had writing and record keeping systems as well as languages that were spread far and wide due to their influence, so for many languages things like region names may be loaned from Latin or Greek. In the case of Japan they were a closed off nation and mostly came in contact with neighboring countries until European trade companies made their way there, so many words and place names in Japanese are loaned from English for example.

It's also affected by the intricacies of each different language. Some times names mean something in their native language and they're translated etymologically in other languages, so the end result sounds completely different but means the same, or the name is phonetically adapted to the other languages but due to differences in writing systems and spelling it may sound similar, but still different.

Basically, there's tons of different ways something like a country name may be adopted into a language, and the study of the origin of words themselves is tricky by itself since some words can very easily be traced back centuries while other have a very hazy and confusing history, so really there's no rule for coming up with country names in other languages, you have to examine it case by case, as in per language and per country name in said language.

In the case of Japan in English there's various theories, none concrete though. This article illustrates the issue a bit, while also providing a possible origin

>The origin of the name Japan is not certain, but researchers say it probably came from the Malayan ″Japung″ or the Chinese ″Riben,″ meaning roughly land of the rising sun.

Historians say the Japanese called their country Yamato in its early history, and they began using Nippon around the seventh century. Nippon and Nihon are used interchangeably as the country’s name.

In general the names of countries and regions in different languages is a product of the history of the world itself. War, Empires, Trade, have all impacted this throughout the ages.

I used to wonder this when I was little.

My partner is French. It’s recently been annoying me that in UK we don’t pronounce Paris ‘Pa-reeee’ like the French do. It’s their name, why are we not saying it like them. The same for them with London and Londres.

I’m all for saying it the correct way, we are after all in the future now, we can correct these things.

But saying ‘Pa-reee’ for Paris just sounds pretentious, so I don’t.

Fun fact. The name a country gives itself is an endonym, and the foreign name is an exonym.

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It's somewhat tied to whomever is making contact, mapping the area, etc. Sometimes they makes stuff up or just name it after the city (probably asked "what do you call this place?"

Germany comes from a town in Deutschland.

Taiwan was called Formosa until quite recently, named ilha Formosa (beautiful island) by Portugese explorers.

Japan calls itself Nippon or Nihon, but the Portugese learned of Japan from the Chinese who would pronounce the same written characters "cipangu" or the Malay who would say, "Japang".

In China, the US is called Mei Guo or "beautiful country".

England in Ying Guo, which sounds pretty close.

San Francisco is Jiu Jin Shan or "old gold mountain"