English

　　The origin of this glossary can be dated back to 1982 when Prof. Xue-qiang Xu was visiting the then Centre of Urban Studies and Urban Planning (renamed as the Centre of Urban Planning and Environmental Management in 1989) as a Visiting Chinese Scholar for 12 months. At that time, China was opening up to the Western world, and there was an increasingly intensified academic exchange and cooperation between Chinese and Western scholars in the filed of urban and regional planning and studies. While there was a great need for Chinese scholars to understand the literature published in the West and Western scholars to understand the work published in Chinese, the language obstacle, however, had yet to be removed. In view of this, both Professors Yeh and Xu felt it that there would be a great need to compile an English-Chinese/Chinese-English glossary on urban and regional planning and studies for the benefits of both Chinese and Western scholars and professionals. It was with this purpose that this project was initiated under the collaboration of the two institutes since the mid-1980s. The existing edition takes shape after several rounds of drafting and amendments during the 1990s.

　　The use of this Glossary is very simple. The user may conduct a search through three languages: English, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese. In searching for a term, the user inputs the English word in the search box and clicks “Search”, the system will automatically display the Chinese translation of the word; and vice versa. The system also enables fuzzy matching. User can also input part of word of the term and the system will automatically display all the terms which contain that the word the user has input and their corresponding translations. For example, if the user inputs the word “planning” and clicks the Search button, the system will show all terms containing the word “planning”. Even the user inputs an incomplete word, say “plannin”, the system can still display all the terms containing “plannin”. In this case, searching by either “planning” or “plannin” will make no much difference. This function brings more convenience and efficiency to the users.