Protestant missionaries played a significant role in the introduction of Western knowledge to modern China. New Chinese scientific terminologies, such as the names of chemical elements and the scientific names of animals and plants, had to be created, especially after the mid-nineteenth century, when Western scientific books were translated into Chinese at the behest of government and church organizations. Confusion was inevitable in cases where translations had been produced by different translators without any reference available for consultation. This was indeed the situation that Protestant missionaries faced during the second half of the nineteenth century. To address this problem of vocabulary confusion in translation, Justus Doolittle, an American missionary familiar with the Foochow dialect, made a preliminary attempt to achieve terminological consistency. In his A Vocabulary and Handbook of the Chinese Language, Romanized in the Mandarin Dialect, published in 1872, Doolittle endeavored to incorporate 85 fields and cover more than 9000 terms used by translators at the time (Elman Citation2005). The foundation of the “School and Textbook Series Committee” in Shanghai in 1877 was aimed at unifying the Chinese scientific vocabulary used in the textbooks compiled by the Church to resolve the problem of confusion in translation. To effectively unify the scientific vocabulary, the Committee resolved to compile The Translator’s Vade-mecum to serve as a reference text for textbook translation.
