Translating Chinese and English documents since 1998

Don Rogalski began studying Chinese in 1993 in Taiwan, and moved into the field of freelance translation in 1998. Initial work involved editing ad copy in English for scooter distributors looking to branch out into North America. This quickly evolved into doing the translations of the Chinese ads themselves. Upon establishing himself as a freelance translator back in Canada Don developed a keen interest in the plethora of research being conducted in China and Taiwan. He has translated over sixty journal articles in the fields of science and medicine, including the results of dozens of drug trials, and has put numerous Chinese government standards in the field of engineering into English as well. He has translated over fifty patents to do with everything from synthesizing vinylpiridine to the catalytic behavior of cerium-containing multicomponent oxides in propylene ammoxidation to new types of intravenous nutritional infusion devices. There have been quite a few interesting jobs over the years, but some that stand out include translating the Chinese reviews of the New York Philharmonic's concerts in China in 2002 and 2008; producing 43,357 English words from Chinese news articles for the Linguistic Data Consortium at the University of Pennsylvania for the purposes of research into machine translation; and numerous articles on the "informatization" of the Chinese military for the Foreign Military Studies Office of the U.S.

Toni Kuo, a native of Taiwan, taught ESL for ten years before turning her hand to translations from English into Chinese. She got her feet wet by doing small commercial jobs for companies in Canada, the U.S. and other countries wishing to reach out to Chinese-speaking tourists, but soon developed an ongoing interest in the translation of medical documents. A good portion of her current work involves medical consent forms and protocols for clinical trials. Don and Toni have done so many medical translations between Chinese and English that they have become one of their specialities, and the medical glossary they have compiled over the years reflects this. Toni works very hard at employing the correct terminology for both China and Taiwan; Mandarin is standard for both markets, but each has its idiosyncracies, not to mention the fact that China uses simplified characters introduced in the 1950s while Taiwan has retained the traditional Chinese characters of old. Among Toni's more notable translation projects: tourist literature for Tanzania National Parks, a comic book of stories about Anan, one of the disciples of the Buddha, and a series of twenty-seven television commercial scripts for Barbie dolls in China.