Introduction

As the Chinese language evolved, it absorbed loanwords from languages such as Sanskrit as Buddhist texts were translated into Chinese. Mongolian, Manchu, and Japanese also influenced the Chinese language. The introduction outlines the importance of early volumes of terminology ranging from the first term dictionary Erya to the unique collection of natural science terms Mengxi bitan. A history of China’s committees for elaborating and establishing consistency in terminology is presented, for example the Commission for Verification of Scientific Terminology. The academic emphasis on scientific terminology continued into the 1950s with the founding of the Translation Bureau of the Chinese Academy and the Committee for Scientific Terminology Unification; however, the work of the latter also covered the subfields of literature and the arts. The introduction delineates the influence of the China National Commission for Terms in Sciences and Technologies (CNCTST), which was set up in 1985. The CNCTST elaborated and unified terminology in the natural sciences, extended its remit to the social sciences, and launched the Journal of China Terminology. The National Technical Committee of Terminology Standardization oversaw immense progress in creating a complete terminological system and a complete set of national terminological standards. A series of databases such as the CNCTST’s own term database have facilitated increasingly sophisticated 21st-century, computer-based terminology research via large-scale corpora and other methods.