英汉翻译作业(5) 参考译文

邀请名人做广告，只要商品确实是货真价实，名人又愿意，这应该是广告技巧的上策，会产生很强的名人效应。但是商品质量差，广告又言过其实，又请名人做广告，这种广告一时也会产生一些好的影响，但最终是砸了自己的牌子，也塌了名人台，影响名人的信誉，因此名人在接受时要慎之又慎。请名人做广告，付给的报酬高得惊人，而一些名人尤其是政界和科学界的名流往往不肯抛头露面。这样西方国家的一些广告商便在平民中千方百计物色酷似名流的人来做广告，甚至被弄去参加开业典礼或者开张剪裁以招徕生意。局外人往往不明真相而受蒙骗。正因为真假难分，名人替身常遭不测。

To invite those eminent persons to help make advertisements should be regarded as one of the best ad strategies and could of course, produce a spectacular VIP effect, provided that those eminent persons are perfectly willing to accept the invitation and, more importantly, the commodities to be advertised are genuine and their prices fair.

Sometimes, while a commodity is of inferior quality, the ad is full of words lavishing praise on it. If, under such a circumstance, an eminent person comes to help make the ad, the ad could, if anything, be temporarily successful before it turns the brand of the commodity in question notorious and more disastrously, ruins the reputation of the eminent person thereafter. It is precisely for this reason that the eminent persons are well advised to think more than twice before agreeing to appear on a commercial.

Despite the fact that an eminent person could be paid a staggering sum of money after he or she helps make a commercial ad, some eminent persons, those in political and scientific circles in particular, are averse to public exposures. As a result, some advertisers in Western countries have had to try every means possible to scout among the populace at large men or women that are very copies of the eminent persons they are after.

Once recruited, an eminent person’s substitute, apart from appearing on an ad, is often made to show up on certain high profile occasions, such as opening ceremonies or ribbon cutting ceremonies, with a view to soliciting customers. Outsiders, unable to distinguish a real eminent person from his substitute, are usually taken in. However, not every hired substitute is lucky. Some of them may become victims of unexpected attacks aimed at the real eminent persons and suffer unfortunately, for them.

Work Produced against the grain and in marginality by George Steiner in After Babel:

This book was written under somewhat difficult circumstances .I was at the time increasingly marginalized and indeed isolated within the academic community. This is not ,necessarily, a handicap. Tenure in the academy today ,the approval of one’s professional peers, the assistance and laurels in their giving, are not infrequently symptoms of opportunism and mediocre conventionality. A degree of exclusion, of compelled apartness, may be one of the conditions of valid work. In the humanities,in the disciplines of intuitive discourse, committees, colloquia, the conference circuit are the bane. Nothing is more ludicrous than the roll-call of academic colleagues and sponsors set out in grateful footnotes at the bottom of trivia. In poetics ,in philosophy, in hermeneutics, work worth doing will more often than not be produced against the grain and in marginality.