Homosexual (同性恋)

This word earns its own entry because its English and Chinese fates diverged completely.

The clinical history first: “homosexual” was coined in late nineteenth-century Europe and was a quasi-medical term from birth; for the better part of a century afterward, mainstream medicine treated homosexuality as a disease. The page turned at a few well-known points — the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its diagnostic manual in 1973, the World Health Organization struck it from the International Classification of Diseases in 1990, and China’s CCMD-3 stopped classifying homosexuality itself as pathological in 2001. Scientifically, “it’s an illness” is a closed chapter (see Is it an illness? and the history timeline).

Now the divergence. In English, the clinical baggage stuck: “homosexual” sounds cold and dated, almost no one self-describes with it, and media style guides recommend “gay” and “lesbian” instead — especially avoid the noun form “a homosexual.” In Chinese, the calque 同性恋 (tongxinglian, “same-sex love”) took the opposite path: it is the neutral standard written term, used without stigma in news, science writing, and legal discussion, while everyday and community speech prefers tongzhi, gay, or lala.

Common mistranslation: rendering Chinese 同性恋 as “homosexual” in English text imports a clinical chill the original does not carry — “gay people” or “same-sex couples” is usually the faithful choice. The register mismatch runs in both directions, and translators trip over it constantly.