In China, there is a bizarre phenomenon whereby many universities have been given the adjective 'Normal'. At first, it appears to be rather bizarre indeed as to why only some universities are normal and it leaves you thinking: are the others abnormal? Well, the fact of the matter is that 师范 has been translated into 'normal' where we would now use 'teacher training' instead. It seems to be just another case of diachronic translation being used in China. The rest of the world did used to use 'normal' to describe teacher training universities, just as we used to use 'gay' to describe happy people, but as time goes by, so does language and some terms become more popular than others.
