Abstract

“Conceptual transfer” was originally treated merely on a monocultural level, which was rather the case with the dictionary project Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. This excluded the dimension of conceptual transfers across large linguistic and cultural boundaries. However, in recent years, it has been acknowledged that the phenomena of conceptual transfer have to be studied on an intercultural level along with transfer processes of Western knowledge. East Asia, for example, can be regarded as a well-working transfer factory, where not only a West-East movement took place, but starting from the Japanese language transferring new concepts into the Chinese- and Korean-speaking areas also a West-East-East movement can be described as a global turn of Western concepts.