Construction of an Online Lexicon of Chinese Loan Words and Phrases Translated from English

Abstract

From Morrison to Pearl S. Buck, Chinese language has been introducing new words from western languages – English as a typical source – for over a hundred years. Generally speaking, this new vocabulary is termed as loan words, which can be traced to two major sources: 1. Introduced by western missionaries having worked in China; 2. Introduced by Chinese intellectuals via Japanese “ (hé zhì hàn cí)” that were originally translated from western literature in the early 1900s. From the perspective of Chinese-English equivalence, these new words in Chinese form a one-to-one relation with their English source words for they were directly or indirectly translated from English. Therefore they may translate it into some other expressions. Currently, dictionaries of Chinese loan words serve as the vehicles of this new type of vocabulary, but they have only paper-versions and limited number of entries, which lag behind the fast development of information technology and the growing need of instant acquirement of knowledge. Therefore, to compile a new lexicon for Chinese loan words that have one-to-one correspondence with English will help translators work with a better quality and efficiency.