This paper attempts to study various patterns of word-formation of nouns in present-day English and Chinese. The study is restricted to only one word class because a limited scope allows for more detailed treatment and because the word class chosen is of special significance in interlingual borrowing, as the majority of loan words in Chinese are nouns. The aim is to provide a better understanding and a more fruitful exploration of the problem of translation between the two languages, especially that of rendering English words into Chinese. The author is concerned in this study with written language rather than the spoken language, i.e., with the visual rather than the auditory signs of communication. The material under discussion are words found in written texts. For the methods of word-formation and for examples in Chinese, the author has mainly based himself on C.W. Lu's Hanyu de goucifa (Word-formation in Chinese) and from Y.R. Chao's A Grammar of Spoken Chinese. As for English, the author depends largely on Hans Marchand's The Categories and Types of Present-day English Word-formation, Otto Jespersen's A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles and Robert Lees' The Grammar of English Nominalizations.