One of the most important extant texts in Jurchen is the inscription on the back of "the Jin Victory Memorial Stele" (大金得勝陀頌碑; Dà jīn déshèngtuó sòngbēi), which was erected in 1185, during the reign of Emperor Shizong.

Both dictionaries were found as sections of the manuscripts prepared by those two agencies, whose job was to help the imperial government to communicate with foreign nations or ethnic minorities, in writing or orally, respectively.

[6] The vocabulary lists compiled by the Bureau of Interpreters became first known to the Western scholars in 1910, and in 1912 L. Aurousseau reported the existence of a manuscript of it with a Jurchen section, supplied to him by Yang Shoujing.

[8] The time of its creation is not certain; various scholars thought that it could have been created as late as c. 1601 (by Mao Ruicheng) or as early as 1450–1500;[9] Daniel Kane's analysis of the dictionary, published in 1989, surmises that it may have been written in the first half of the 16th century, based on the way the Jurchen words are transcribed into Chinese.

Due to the scarcity of surviving Jurchen-language inscriptions, the overwhelming majority of primary documentary sources on the Jurchen people available to modern scholars are in Chinese.

Thus, for example, the Jurchen name of the first Jin emperor is written in Chinese as 完顏阿骨打, and appears in English scholarship as Wanyan Aguda (using Pinyin) or Wan-yen A-ku-ta (using the Wade–Giles system).