The emergence of modern Chinese-foreign language dictionaries: ideas and practice

The article analyzes the compilation of bilingual dictionaries, in particular Chinese-foreign language dictionaries, focusing in the second chapter on those created by Robert Morrison (Ma Lixun 马礼逊, 1782-1834) and Karl Ernst Georg Hemeling (He Meiling 赫美玲, 1878-1925). The third chapter then is centred on the description of Chinese language within the Chinese-foreign language dictionaries of the 19th century, as well as of the equivalence of concepts and words. The following two chapters are finally devoted to the works by Kuang Qizhao 邝其照 (1836-after 1899?) and Yan Fu 严复 (1854-1921). The article is an important analysis on the evolution from zidian to cidian, of the way Chinese language, in the process of transmission of modern Western knowledge to the East, transformed new Western concepts in usable linguistic materials, and of how translations were created in the process of the compilation of dictionaries.