Kurt Gingold was born in Austria in 1929. He studied at Tulane University, where he was active in the student chapter of the American Chemical Society and, graduating in 1950. He went on to do graduate work at Harvard, obtaining his doctorate in Chemistry in 1954. In 1957 Gingold was a contestant on the NBC game showTwenty-One. For thirty years he worked as a translator for American Cyanamid, going on to work as a consultant translator for Boehringer Ingelheim. He was a charter member of the AmericanTranslators Association, founded in 1959, serving as vice president 1960–63, and as president 1963–65. It was in the latter capacity that, on September 30, 1964, he gave a presentation to the Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee of the National Academy of Sciences and the United States National Research Council, explaining the lack of correlation between cost and quality in commercial translation. In 1965 he became the second recipient of the Gode Medal for services to the profession. He was accredited by the ATA as a translator into English from French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Dutch. Gingold served as a Vice-President of the International Federation of Translators, and in 1970 he became director of the Interlingua Institute. Gingold died July 19, 1997.
Publications
As author
Kurt Gingold, Systems of Chlorosilanes and Amides, Harvard University, 1954.
As translator
Mirra Osipovna Korshun, Simultaneous Rapid Combustion, edited by J. A. Kuck. Translated from the Russian by Phyllis L. Bolton and Kurt Gingold. Gordon and Breach, New York, 1964.
Aleksandr Petrovich Terentʹev, et al., Wet combustion and catalytic methods in microanalysis, edited by J. A. Kuck. Translated by Kurt Gingold. Gordon & Breach, 1965.
J. A. Kuck, Determination of carbon and hydrogen and the use of new combustion catalysts. Translated by Kurt Gingold. Gordon and Breach, 1968.
M. A. Dalin, I. K. Kolchin, B. R. Serebryakov, Acrylonitrile. Translated by Kurt Gingold. Westport Conn.: Technomic, 1971.
Kurt Gingold, Soviet Urethane Technology. CRC Press, 1973.
Natal'ia Petrovna Bechtereva, The Neurophysiological Aspects of Human Mental Activity. Translated from the Russian by Kurt Gingold and James Woodbury. 2nd edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Originally published in Russian, Leningrad: Meditsina Publishing House, 1974.
Kurt Gingold, Synthesis and Physical Chemistry of Urethanes. CRC Press, 1975.
J. A. Kuck, The determination of oxygen, selenium, chromium and tungsten. Translated by Kurt Gingold. Gordon and Breach, 1977. "Translated microchemical research papers of contemporary microanalysts in Italy, West Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union"
J. A. Kuck, The determination of sulfur in the presence of other elements or simultaneously with them. Translated by Kurt Gingold. Gordon and Breach, 1978. "microchemical research papers of contemporary microanalysts in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Roumania and the Soviet Union"
Mark Efimovich Vol'pin, Chemistry Reviews, Vol. 4. Translated by Kurt Gingold. Soviet Scientific Reviews Series. Gordon & Breach Publishing Group, 1982.
M. G. Voronkov, E. A. Maletina, V. K. Roman,Heterosiloxanes: Derivatives of Non-Biogenic Elements Vol 1. Translated by Kurt Gingold. Harwood Academic, 1988.
