Introduction:
The global history of applied psychology has largely been written from a Euro-American viewpoint, often neglecting early intercultural exchanges that shaped the discipline's applied dimension. In 1925, the German missionary Otto Jörgens (SVD) published Xinlixue Gangling (Outline of Psychology) in Chinese, introducing scholastic and experimental psychology to China's teacher-training context and initiating one of the earliest encounters between Western psychological science and Chinese educational reform.


Purpose:
This paper explores Outline of Psychology as an early case of cross-cultural application of psychological knowledge. It asks how psychological concepts were linguistically transformed, pedagogically localized, and ethically adapted to Chinese educational modernization, emphasizing translation as an active site of knowledge creation rather than transmission.


Method:
Archival materials from the SVD Generalate Archives (Steyl) and the United Evangelical Mission Archives (Wuppertal) were examined. A trilingual corpus (German-English-Chinese) was built to compare terminology and translation patterns. Corpus-linguistic tools (AntConc, Sketch Engine) traced semantic migration of key terms such as sensation, apperception, and will. Genealogical mapping situated these conceptual shifts within the broader circulation between European scholastic psychology and Chinese normal-school pedagogy of the 1920s.


Results:
Findings indicate that Jörgens's textbook was not a literal translation but a conceptual mediation between theology and emerging empirical psychology. Its Chinese terminology re-semanticized Seele ("soul/mind") into culturally resonant categories of xin (心 heart-mind) and li (理 principle). By redefining mental functions through moral and educational behavior, the work operationalized psychological knowledge for classroom use, prefiguring the institutionalization of applied psychology in modern China and offering a historical lens on how global psychology first took root in a non-Western intellectual setting.


Conclusions:
This study highlights translation as a formative process of application in early global psychology. It reframes "application" not only as practical use but as cultural negotiation through which psychological knowledge became pedagogically meaningful across civilizations, revealing how linguistic adaptation fostered the global plurality of psychological thought.