Chinese translations of legal terms in early modern period: An empirical study of the books compiled/translated by missionaries around the mid-nineteenth century

China-based missionaries around the mid-nineteenth century played a crucial role in initially rendering legal terms in Western languages into Chinese. A survey of early English-Chinese magazines, dictionaries, and books on law reveals the forms in which the earliest translated legal terms in Chinese assume, calling attention to their marked differences from the same set of terms in Chinese characters that were later borrowed from Japan. The findings about the missionaries’ creative translation activities in China are of cultural and socio-psychological interests to Chinese lawyers, historians, and translators of our time.