Essays on Writing and Language in Honor - Sino-Platonic Papers

Sino-Plutonic Papers, 27 (August 3 1, 199 1)
field, such as fujia chenqfen Tif.da&,$ which is used to express
either the concept of "a££ ix" or the concept of 'tattribute" in
linguistics. 3) A more serious question is the fact that a large
number of terms have more than one equivalent in Chinese
six:
as with the astronomical term vpolytropeff which was translated as
uocensaiu 9 A I$. (multilayer ball) at first, and was later
Lranslatedas duofanu moxina 43 &+ owing to the discovery
that there is neither wlayerw nor Ifball" in the concept of the
word. 5) Heterogeneity often comes from the preference for the
semantic loanwords. A number of loanwords or terms were
transferred into Chinese by means of a phonetic approach at
first, but later substituted with semantic loanwords, thus making
up a kind of parallelism, at least for a period of time. For
instance, bulai i & 4 (from Russian n4ak.C~) --> Jianviuu&&;&
ximinana'er ,7 ,f, (from Russian ~run*p ) --> iianaxibanannixilin
++l from English penicillin) -- ainumeisu +$fL
(from English laser --> jiauana &kt)~ , etc. T e
Pv
last one is typical: msai jkd (leishe $kg Taiwan and
Hongkong) is a phonetic loanword, while jiuu- 8~ is a
semantic one, in which the first morpheme fi expresses the
concept of "stimulatew and the second morpheme quanq "light or
rayw.
3.2.2 The Contention of Phonetic and Semantic Approaches in
Translation: As we noted above, terminological chaos is often
caused by the contention of phonetic and semantic approaches. It
is well known that terms may be divided into three subclasses,
i.e. pure terms, terms and quasi-terms. Pure terms are the .most
specific ones, while quasi-terms are close to ordinary
vocabulary. It is apparent that there is no harm in adopting a
phonetic approach with respect to such pure terms as neutron and
198; the former might be transformed into niuton (tr --> t in
this place, as there is no such consonant cluster in Chinese),
and the latter into yon or ion. There are merits in
internationalization of terms so that "the agony of a long-term
hesitation, caused by the establishment of a termw* might be
avoided and that the burden of students might be reduced and
academic ' exchange facilitated as well. The internationalization
of terms is an irresistible trend, but it has not understood by
the majority yet. As for the mistranslation of the above-
mentioned term Itpolytropew, it could have been avoided in the
first place if the phonetic approach had been adopted.
* & u -- a famous remark made by our great
translator Yan Fu.