Impact Of Modern Meteorology Translation On The Construction Of Meteorology Discipline In China

The winds, rains, thunders, fogs, dews even the hazes today affect our everyday life, from which the ancient Chinese also drew lots of precious experiences and invented a large number of observing and measuring meteorological instruments,which still failed to evolve into the modern Meteorology until the end of the Qing Dynasty.As is acknowledged,the failure of the two great Opium Wars shocked the old arrogant China from the bottom to the upper class, which forced the intellectuals to learn science and technologies from the western counterpart urgently, when they came to perceive modern discipline division and idea of science research. In virtue of the fact that meteorology is too important to wars, agriculture development and other fields of people's livelihood,which makes the introduction and translation of meteorology science inevitable. However, due to the fact that there are also great meteorology cultures in old China, it is not easy for the western meteorology science to be transplanted into China smoothly. Therefore, it requires a rough process to make the western meteorology science completely accepted. On the other hand, the western meteorology science was transplanted at that time as a modern discipline, which is a well-organized system composed of scientific terminology,theoretical system as well as established research methods.Firstly: As there was no meteorology research tradition in ancient China, it is not easy for the country and people to accept the idea of modern meteorology shortly after the country was forced to open and reform by the power of war. Both the missionaries and the local translators employed to import elementary meteorology conceptions during the two great Opium Wars. The theoretical knowledge was actually very elementary and only some basic meteorology instruments was brought in.Since no modem meteorological conceptions existed in the traditional Chinese meteorological cultures, the transplantation of the foreign meteorology terminology encounters great troubles. At first, it's always not easy to find the right counterpart in correspondence to the imported conception. Then, two or more Chinese expressions were always employed to translate the same meteorology conceptions. On the other hand, not until the Self-Strenthening Movement appeared, a larger number of sophisticated equipments and more complex meteorological theories were introduced. Slowly, the situation became better. The disciplinary terminology went to consolidate while the instruments were largely employed to do practical experiments, on which theoretical conclusions was based. In conclusion, the meteorology knowledge introduced at the 1960s was too elementary that it' s impossible to develop into modern Meteorology discipline until the great pile of communication happened from Japan to China at the beginning of the 20th century.With Navagational, Agricultural, Theoretical Meteorology being all together translated and taught at local school, the modem discipline structure of meteorology came into being.Therefore, the study focuses on the development of modern meteorology discipline in China during the introduction and communication period. However,there are a lot that still need to be further studied, such as how was the foreign terminology introduced and formed into a system,so was the scattered knowledge formed into an independent discipline, how were the research methods evolved and deposited..