Methods of Terminological Innovation Used by the Cairo Language Academy

The encounter of the Arabic language with Western cultural concepts goes back as far as the middle of the nineteenth century. This encounter constituted a threat to literary Arabic. The new concepts that kept infiltrating more and more into every sphere of life, revealed that Arabic was unprepared to meet modern challenges. The lack of words and terms, to express the new concepts, was striking in all spheres, but most particularly in the scientific domain. This insufficiency created the need to find immediate solutions to fill the gaps.  The situation brought about a wave of demands on behalf of scholars and intellectuals to create a language academy, responsible for the protection and modernization of Arabic. The article examines the three most common translation methods used by the Academy to create words: substitutional, explanatory, and compound translation.