莎(shā) - sha, a character used in transliterated names in Mandarin

莎 (shā) is a character you meet inside names rather than a word you use on its own. It carries the sha sound in transliterated foreign names: 莎士比亚 for Shakespeare, 莎莉 for Sally, 爱莎, 玛莎, 莎拉. It is also a common syllable in Chinese girls' names, chosen for the soft sound and the grass radical.

Read alone it means a sedge, in the word 莎草, and in that botanical sense it is pronounced suō rather than shā. Outside a botany textbook you will never need that reading.

The trap is expecting it to mean something. Transliteration characters are chosen for sound and for the pleasant look of the graph, not for sense, so there is nothing to translate. Do not build a sentence around 莎 as an independent word, and do not confuse it with 沙 (shā, sand), which is the phonetic inside it and is a real everyday word.