ABSTRACT
Technical and scientific terms posed a particular problem. John Fryer, who served at the Jiangnan Arsenal for over 20 years, from 1 867 , explained their modus operandi (Xiong Yuezhi 1 994: 497): first a check was made to see if a term was in the existing literature or in use in trade circles; if not, a translation was invented, either by concocting a new charac ter, borrowing a disused one, or by coining a descriptive term (for example 'nourishing gas' for oxygen or 'light gas ' for hydrogen) , or by using polysyllabic phonetic representation. The invented term was then entered into a dictionary for later standardization. Despite this attempt at a system, variation was rife.
