From “Sushi” ( 素食) to “Shushi” ( 蔬食): A Corpus-Based Study of Lü Bicheng’s Terminology Construction
Studies of translated terms in modern China have largely focused on male intellectual elites and on scientific and technological terminology; the people who coined renderings for everyday-life and social-movement concepts have received less attention. Drawing on the self-built Lü Bicheng Translation Corpus (93,973 characters, 44 items, stratified into Chinese and Western sub-corpora), this article examines quantitatively the terminology system of The Light of Europe and America (1932), compiled by Lü Bicheng. The statistics show that shushi 蔬食 occurs 90 times across 15 items, whereas sushi 素食, the later standard rendering, occurs only twice, both times when Lü reports others’ words; her own naming uses shushi throughout. The form heads a complete derivational series (shushi-hui “vegetarian society,” shushi-zhuyi “vegetarianism,” and so on), roughly symmetrical with the vegetarian family (91 occurrences) in the Western sub-corpus, and its dominant-form ratio reaches 97.8 percent. The article then analyzes naming motivation, consistency of use, and translation norms, takes the self-coined proper name You Lake 麀湖 (Moosehead Lake) as a case, and explains, with reference to the historical fate of Yan Fu’s renderings, why shushi failed to replace sushi in modern Chinese.
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