Translating Western Concepts by Creating New Characters:A Comparison of Japanese and Chinese Attempts
西方新概念的容受与造新字为译词——-以日本兰学家与来华传教士为例

Chinese characters are considered as an adaptable system,open to expansion and revision . Throughout history,the creation of new characters was one of the most important solutions toenlargements of theconceptual repertoire .Both scholars of″D utch Learning″in Japan and missionaries active in nineteenth-century China used Chinese characters in their translations of western concepts . From a methodological point of view,Japanese scholars mostly coined compound words rendering the literal meanings of their terms of departure while translators in China,invigorated by the success of the new characters devised for chemical elements,believed that drafting new characters was more in line with the characteristics of the Chinese language . However,notwithstanding the painstaking efforts with which they were created,the new characters proposed by missionaries were eventually replaced by compound terms first used in Japanese adaptations . This paper examines the different practices and attitudes of Chinese and Japanese authors toward thecreation of newcharacters as a method of translation .Analyzing the influence of their divergent approaches on the lexical systems of their respective languages,since Chinese has a very limited number of phonetic patterns,I conclude that it is impossible to create viable technical terminologies only by increasing new characters .