A Review on John Fryer’s Scientific Translation in the Late Qing Dynasty

Abstract

John Fryer was a British missionary in the late Qing Dynasty who came to China and was employed by The Translation Department of Kiangnan Arsenal. He has been engaged in the translation work for over 28 years, not only having translated a great deal of Western scientific works into Chinese, but also having contributed greatly to the standardization of the scientific terminology translation. This paper first attempts to analyze the previous studies on John Fryer, and then tries to analyze the studies on scientific translation in the late Qing Dynasty. Based on the analyses, we come to a conclusion that a detailed and systematic study on John Fryer’s scientific translation and his contribution to the standardization of translated scientific terminologies is greatly worth doing.