Croissant in Chinese

　　I wrote about the Croissant ice cream in the last piece. When I dropped in at the stall and found the Chinese name of the croissant ice cream written over the counter, I felt a curious mixture of fun and a sense of anxiety. I'm going to mention this feeling of anxiety in this entry. As you see in the picture of the last entry, a croissant is written as 金牛角, each character meaning "golden", "bull" and "horn" respectively. Who decided or figured out this expression by Chinese characters? In the case of Japan, the word "croissant" is easily and automatically at the same time translated into Japanese, using Katakana, the Japanese phonogram. This is not a big deal, of course. It's just about a croissant.
　　However, how would they cope with new highly technical words, like new medicine, high-molecular compound, and so on. About 20 years ago, a religious cult perpetrated massive terrorism against ordinary people in Tokyo using sarin gas. Almost all the people in Japan seemingly didn't know the name of sarin gas at that time, but the news was spread across the country and people knew sarin gas by its name described in Japanese. I wonder how the word "sarin gas" was translated into Chinese? This task wouldn't be easy. Isn't it rather difficult to do research of cutting-edge technology? I admired Katakana, the phonogram, seeing 金牛角.

(Vocabulary)
a curious mixture of joy and fear　喜びと恐れの交じった妙な気持ち
phonogram  表音文字
high-molecular compound 高分子化合物