英译汉竞赛原文
第七届翻译大赛英文原文

OpticsManini NayarWhen I was seven, my friend Sol was hit by lightning and died. He was on a rooftop quietly playing marbles when this happened. Burnt to cinders, we were told by the neighbourhood gossips. He'd caught fire, we were assured, but never felt a thing. I only remember a frenzy of ambulances and long clean sirens cleaving the silence of that damp October night. Later, my father came to sit with me. This happens to one in several millions, he said, as if a knowledge of the bare statistics mitigated the horror. He was trying to help, I think. Or perhaps he believed I thought it would happen to me. Until now, Sol and I had shared everything; secrets, chocolates, friends, even a birthdate. We would marry at eighteen, we promised each other, and have six children, two cows and a heart-shaped tattoo with 'Eternally Yours' sketched on our behinds. But now Sol was somewhere else, and I was seven years old and under the covers in my bed counting spots before my eyes in the darkness.After that I cleared out my play-cupboard. Out went my collection of teddy bears and picture books. In its place was an emptiness, the oak panels reflecting their own woodshine. The space I made seemed almost holy, though mother thought my efforts a waste. An empty cupboard is no better than an empty cup, she said in an apocryphal aside. Mother always filled things up - cups, water jugs, vases, boxes, arms - as if colour and weight equalled a superior quality of life. Mother never understood that this was my dreamtime place. Here I could hide, slide the doors shut behind me, scrunch my eyes tight and breathe in another world. When I opened my eyes, the glow from the lone cupboard-bulb seemed to set the polished walls shimmering, and I could feel what Sol must have felt, dazzle and darkness. I was sharing this with him, as always. He would know, wherever he was, that I knew what he knew, saw what he had seen. But to mother I only said that I was tired of teddy bears and picture books. What she thought I couldn't tell, but she stirred the soup-pot vigorously.One in several millions, I said to myself many times, as if the key, the answer to it all, lay there. The phrase was heavy on my lips, stubbornly resistant to knowledge. Sometimes I said the words out of con- text to see if by deflection, some quirk of physics, the meaning would suddenly come to me. Thanks for the beans, mother, I said to her at lunch, you're one in millions. Mother looked at me oddly, pursed her lips and offered me more rice. At this club, when father served a clean ace to win the Retired-Wallahs Rotating Cup, I pointed out that he was one in a million. Oh, the serve was one in a million, father protested modestly. But he seemed pleased. Still, this wasn't what I was looking for, and in time the phrase slipped away from me, lost its magic urgency, became as bland as 'Pass the salt' or 'Is the bath water hot?' If Sol was one in a million, I was one among far less; a dozen, say. He was chosen. I was ordinary. He had been touched and transformed by forces I didn't understand. I was left cleaning out the cupboard. There was one way to bridge the chasm, to bring Solback to life, but I would wait to try it until the most magical of moments. I would wait until the moment was so right and shimmering that Sol would have to come back. This was my weapon that nobody knew of, not even mother, even though she had pursed her lips up at the beans. This was between Sol and me.The winter had almost guttered into spring when father was ill. One February morning, he sat in his chair, ashen as the cinders in the grate. Then, his fingers splayed out in front of him, his mouth working, he heaved and fell. It all happened suddenly, so cleanly, as if rehearsed and perfected for weeks. Again the sirens, the screech of wheels, the white coats in perpetual motion. Heart seizures weren't one in a million. But they deprived you just the same, darkness but no dazzle, and a long waiting.Now I knew there was no turning back. This was the moment. I had to do it without delay; there was no time to waste. While they carried father out, I rushed into the cupboard, scrunched my eyes tight, opened them in the shimmer and called out'Sol! Sol! Sol!' I wanted to keep my mind blank, like death must be, but father and Sol gusted in and out in confusing pictures. Leaves in a storm and I the calm axis. Here was father playing marbles on a roof. Here was Sol serving ace after ace. Here was father with two cows. Here was Sol hunched over the breakfast table. The pictures eddied and rushed. The more frantic they grew, the clearer my voice became, tolling like a bell: 'Sol! Sol! Sol!' The cupboard rang with voices, some mine, some echoes, some from what seemed another place - where Sol was, maybe. The cup- board seemed to groan and reverberate, as if shaken by lightning and thunder. Any minute now it would burst open and I would find myself in a green valley fed by limpid brooks and red with hibiscus. I would run through tall grass and wading into the waters, see Sol picking flowers. I would open my eyes and he'd be there,hibiscus-laden, laughing. Where have you been, he'd say, as if it were I who had burned, falling in ashes. I was filled to bursting with a certainty so strong it seemed a celebration almost. Sobbing, I opened my eyes. The bulb winked at the walls.I fell asleep, I think, because I awoke to a deeper darkness. It was late, much past my bedtime. Slowly I crawled out of the cupboard, my tongue furred, my feet heavy. My mind felt like lead. Then I heard my name. Mother was in her chair by the window, her body defined by a thin ray of moonlight. Your father Will be well, she said quietly, and he will be home soon. The shaft of light in which she sat so motionless was like the light that would have touched Sol if he'd been lucky; if he had been like one of us, one in a dozen, or less. This light fell in a benediction, caressing mother, slipping gently over my father in his hospital bed six streets away. I reached out and stroked my mother's arm. It was warm like bath water, her skin the texture of hibiscus.We stayed together for some time, my mother and I, invaded by small night sounds and the raspy whirr of crickets. Then I stood up and turned to return to my room.Mother looked at me quizzically. Are you all right, she asked. I told her I was fine, that I had some c!eaning up to do. Then I went to my cupboard and stacked it up again with teddy bears and picture books.Some years later we moved to Rourkela, a small mining town in the north east, near Jamshedpur. The summer I turned sixteen, I got lost in the thick woods there. They weren't that deep - about three miles at the most. All I had to do was cycle forall I was worth, and in minutes I'd be on the dirt road leading into town. But a stir in the leaves gave me pause.I dismounted and stood listening. Branches arched like claws overhead. The sky crawled on a white belly of clouds. Shadows fell in tessellated patterns of grey and black. There was a faint thrumming all around, as if the air were being strung and practised for an overture. And yet there was nothing, just a silence of moving shadows, a bulb winking at the walls. I remembered Sol, of whom I hadn't thought in years. And foolishly again I waited, not for answers but simply for an end to the terror the woods were building in me, chord by chord, like dissonant music. When the cacophony grew too much to bear, I remounted and pedalled furiously, banshees screaming past my ears, my feet assuming a clockwork of their own. The pathless ground threw up leaves and stones, swirls of dust rose and settled. The air was cool and steady as I hurled myself into the falling light.光学玛尼尼·纳雅尔谈瀛洲译在我七岁那年,我的朋友索尔被闪电击中死去了。
第五届“学府杯”翻译竞赛原文(英译汉)

Smart Energy Solutions: Increase RenewablesA variety of energy sources can be used to generate electricity, including coal, natural gas, nuclear power, and renewable resources like wind, water, plants, and the sun. Our energy choices have direct implications for our health, our environment, and our climate – and right now we are dangerously dependent on coal and other fossil fuels for most of our electricity needs.Coal is abundant and more equally distributed throughout the world than oil and gas. Global recoverable reserves are the largest of all fossil fuels, and most countries have at least some. Moreover, existing and prospective big energy consumers like the US, China and India are self-sufficient in coal and will be for the foreseeable future. Coal has been exploited on a large scale for two centuries, so both the product and the available resources are well known; no substantial new deposits are expected to be discovered. Extrapolating the demand forecast forward, the world will consume 20% of its current reserves by 2030 and 40% by 2050. Hence, if current trends are maintained, coal would still last several hundred years. However, coal is the worst offender, a dirty energy source that produces less than half our electricity but more than 80 percent of all power plant carbon emissions, along with significant and harmful levels of pollutants that degrade our environment and adversely impact our health.There’s a better, cleaner way to meet our energy needs. Renewable energy resources like wind and solar power generate electricity with little or no pollution and global warming emissions. To move the world toward a cleaner, healthier energy future, we need smart policy decisions focused on two primary goals: Increase renewable energy and decrease the use of coal.Support for renewable energy is growing worldwide and at the beginning of 2014, the governments of 144 countries have set renewable energy targets, almost a ten-fold increase since 2005 when only 15 countries had policies in place. Emerging and developing economies are leading the way, with 95 of them having renewable energy policy plans, according to the Renewable 2014 Global Status Report.The world generated 22.1 percent of its electricity from renewable sources in 2013, even though governments in the EU and US reduced their support. Renewable energy provides 6.5 million jobs worldwide, the report said.China, the US, Brazil, Canada, and Germany are the top renewable power countries in 2013, with Spain, Italy, and India making huge strides, according to the report. Denmark leads per capita power generation, and Uruguay, Mauritius, and Costa Rica were among the top investment locations.The most significant growth is in power generation, as global capacity jumped 8 percent to more than 1,560 gigawatts (GW) in the last year. Hydropower rose by 4 percent to 1,000 GW, and overall renewables grew 17 percent to more than 560 GW.Over 140 countries have adopted new renewable energy targets, including the United States,which has pledged to increase renewable energy capacity 50 percent by 2020. President Obama has promised to slash America’s dependence on coal, and to switch power plants towards cleaner energy.However, it will be difficult for America to switch off coal consumption, as many states depend on it for their economic livelihood. Many lobbying groups are protesting the new clean energy act, saying it unfairly deprives local industries. Even though coal is a proven dirty energy source consumption has reached a 44-year high.Alternative and clean energy is no longer just a hip trend among environmentalists, but a real energy solution that provides power to homes and offices. The market has matured and become an attractive option for energy security. From the currently available technologies, solar photovoltaics, followed by wind power, concentrated solar power and geothermal, have the highest potentials in the power sector. The use of ocean energy might be significantly higher, but with the current state of development, the technical and economical potential remains unclear.Germany is pushing its economy towards renewables, and produces half of its electricity from solar power, The Local reports. In Denmark wind power meets 33 percent of electricity demand, in Spain 20.9 percent, and in Italy solar power meets 7.8 percent of electricity needs. Many cities across the globe have a goal to transition to 100% renewable energy.Over the last 5 years, solar power has on average expanded 55 percent per year, according to the report. Clean energy is becoming cheaper and more popular with consumers, and investors are snapping up the opportunity. Elon Musk, the entrepreneur who invested early in PayPal and the Tesla electric car, has put money into solar power, and Google is weighing a move into the renewables sector.Current levels of renewables development represent only a tiny fraction of what could be developed. Many regions of the world are rich in renewable resources. Spain and Portugal sit on a bed of geothermal energy, but currently use none of it. Scientists from the Renewable Energy Journal estimate Spain has the potential to produce up to 700 GW, which is five times the current electricity power generation of Spain.。
翻译竞赛英译汉参赛原文

翻译竞赛英译汉参赛原文Africa on the Silk RoadThe Dark Continent, the Birthplace of Humanity . . . Africa. All of the lands south and west of the Kingdom of Egypt have for far too long been lumped into one cultural unit by westerners, when in reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Africa is not one mysterious, impenetrable land as the legacy of the nineteenth Century European explorers suggests, it is rather an immensely varied patchwork of peoples that can be changed not only by region and country but b y nature‟s way of separating people – by rivers and lakes and by mountain ranges and deserts. A river or other natural barrier may separate two groups of people who interact, but who rarely intermarry, because they perceive the people on the other side to be “different” from them.Africa played an important part in Silk Road trade from antiquity through modern times when much of the Silk Road trade was supplanted by European corporate conglomerates like the Dutch and British East India Companies who created trade monopolies to move goods around the Old World instead. But in the heyday of the Silk Road, merchants travelled to Africa to trade for rare timbers, gold, ivory, exotic animals and spices. From ports along the Mediterranean and Red Seas to those as far south asMogadishu and Kenya in the Indian Ocean, goods from all across the continent were gathered for the purposes of trade.One of Africa‟s contributions to world cuisine that is still widely used today is sesame seeds. Imagine East Asian food cooked in something other than its rich sesame oil, how about the quintessential American-loved Chinese dish, General Tso‟s Chicken? How …bout the rich, thick tahini paste enjoyed from the Levant and Middle East through South and Central Asia and the Himalayas as a flavoring for foods (hummus, halva) and stir-fries, and all of the breads topped with sesame or poppy seeds? Then think about the use of black sesame seeds from South Asian through East Asian foods and desserts. None of these cuisines would have used sesame in these ways, if it hadn‟t been for the trade of sesame seeds from Africa in antiquity.Given the propensity of sesame plants to easily reseed themselves, the early African and Arab traders probably acquired seeds from native peoples who gathered wild seeds. The seeds reached Egypt, the Middle East and China by 4,000 –5,000 years ago as evidenced from archaeological investigations, tomb paintings and scrolls. Given the eager adoption of the seeds by other cultures and the small supply, the cost per pound was probably quite high and merchants likely made fortunes offthe trade.Tamarind PodsThe earliest cultivation of sesame comes from India in the Harappan period of the Indus Valley by about 3500 years ago and from then on, India began to supplant Africa as a source of the seeds in global trade. By the time of the Romans, who used the seeds along with cumin to flavor bread, the Indian and Persian Empires were the main sources of the seeds.Another ingredient still used widely today that originates in Africa is tamarind. Growing as seed pods on huge lace-leaf trees, the seeds are soaked and turned into tamarind pulp or water and used to flavor curries and chutneys in Southern and South Eastern Asia, as well as the more familiar Worcestershire and barbeque sauces in the West. Eastern Africans use Tamarind in their curries and sauces and also make a soup out of the fruits that is popular in Zimbabwe. Tamarind has been widely adopted in the New World as well as is usually blended with sugar for a sweet and sour treat wrapped in corn husk as a pulpy treat or also used as syrup to flavor sodas, sparkling waters and even ice cream.Some spices of African origin that were traded along the Silk Road have become extinct. One such example can be found in wild silphion whichwas gathered in Northern Africa and traded along the Silk Road to create one of the foundations of the wealth of Carthage and Kyrene. Cooks valued the plant because of the resin they gathered from its roots and stalk that when dried became a powder that blended the flavors of onion and garlic. It was impossible for these ancient people to cultivate, however, and a combination of overharvesting, wars and habitat loss cause the plant to become extinct by the end of the first or second centuries of the Common Era. As supplies of the resin grew harder and harder to get, it was supplanted by asafetida from Central Asia.Other spices traded along the Silk Road are used almost exclusively in African cuisines today – although their use was common until the middle of the first millennium in Europe and Asia. African pepper, Moor pepper or negro pepper is one such spice. Called kieng in the cuisines of Western Africa where it is still widely used, it has a sharp flavor that is bitter and flavorful at the same time –sort of like a combination of black pepper and nutmeg. It also adds a bit of heat to dishes for a pungent taste. Its use extends across central Africa and it is also found in Ethiopian cuisines. When smoked, as it often is in West Africa before use, this flavor deepens and becomes smoky and develops a black cardamom-like flavor. By the middle of the 16th Century, the use and trade of negro pepper in Europe, Western and Southern Asia had waned in favor of black pepper importsfrom India and chili peppers from the New World.Traditional Chinese ShipGrains of paradise, Melegueta pepper, or alligator pepper is another Silk Road Spice that has vanished from modern Asian and European food but is still used in Western and Northern Africa and is an important cash crop in some areas of Ethiopia. Native to Africa‟s West Coast its use seems to have originated in or around modern Ghana and was shipped to Silk Road trade in Eastern Africa or to Mediterranean ports. Fashionable in the cuisines of early Renaissance Europe its use slowly waned until the 18th Century when it all but vanished from European markets and was supplanted by cardamom and other spices flowing out of Asia to the rest of the world.The trade of spices from Africa to the rest of the world was generally accomplished by a complex network of merchants working the ports and cities of the Silk Road. Each man had a defined, relatively bounded territory that he traded in to allow for lots of traders to make a good living moving goods and ideas around the world along local or regional. But occasionally, great explorers accomplished the movement of goods across several continents and cultures.Although not African, the Chinese Muslim explorer Zheng He deserves special mention as one of these great cultural diplomats and entrepreneurs. In the early 15th Century he led seven major sea-faring expeditions from China across Indonesia and several Indian Ocean ports to Africa. Surely, Chinese ships made regular visits to Silk Road ports from about the 12th Century on, but when Zheng came, he came leading huge armadas of ships that the world had never seen before and wouldn‟t see again for several centuries. Zheng came in force, intending to display China‟s greatness to the world and bring the best goods from the rest of the world back to China. Zheng came eventually to Africa where he left laden with spices for cooking and medicine, wood and ivory and hordes of animals. It may be hard for us who are now accustomed to the world coming on command to their desktops to imagine what a miracle it must have been for the citizens of Nanjing to see the parade of animals from Zheng‟s cultural Ark. But try we must to imagine the wonder brought by the parade of giraffes, zebra and ostriches marching down Chinese streets so long ago –because then we can begin to imagine the importance of the Silk Road in shaping the world.。
【英语世界翻译赛往届赛题】-第十一届原文及参考翻译

英译汉原文:Confronting Modern Lifestyles(Excerpt)By Tim Jackson and Carmen Smith【1】Few people would disagree that modern society has changed dramatically in the course of only a few decades.These changes can be characterized in a variety of different ways.We can point,for example,to the growth in disposable incomes,to a massive expansion in the availability of consumer goods and services,to higher levels of personal mobility,increases in leisure expenditure and a reduction in the time spent in routine domestic tasks.【2】We might highlight the gains in technological efficiency provided by an increasingly sophisticated knowledge base.Or the rising resource“footprint”of modern consumption patterns.Or the intensification of trade.Or the decline in traditional rural industries.Or the translocation of manufacturing towards the developing world.Or the emergence of the“knowledge”economy.【3】We should certainly point out that these changes have been accompanied,and sometimes facilitated,by changes in the underlying institutional structures:the deregulation(or reregulation)of key industries,the liberalization of markets,the easing of international trade restrictions, the rise in consumer debt and the commoditization of previously noncommercial areas of our lives.【4】We could also identify some of the social effects that accompanied these changes:a faster pace of life;rising social expectations;increasing divorce rates;rising levels of violent crime; smaller household sizes;the emergence of a“cult of celebrity”;the escalating“message density”of modern living;increasing disparities(in income and time)between the rich and the poor,the emergence of “postmaterialist”values;a loss of trust in the conventional institutions of church,family,and state;and a more secular society.【5】It is clear,even from this cursory overview,that no simple overriding“good”or“bad”trend emerges from this complexity.Rather, modernity is characterized by a variety of trends that often seem to be set (in part at least)in opposition to each other.The identification of a set of “postmaterialist”values in modern society appears at odds with the increased proliferation of consumer goods.People appear to express less concern for material things,and yet have more of them in their lives.【6】The abundance offered by the liberalization of trade is offset bythe environmental damage from transporting these goods across distances to reach our supermarket shelves.The liberalization of the electricity market has increased the efficiency of generation,reduced the cost of electricity to consumers and at the same time made it more difficult to identify and exploit the opportunities for end-use energy efficiency.【7】To take another example,the emergence of the knowledge economy has increased the availability and the value of information. Simultaneously,it has intensified the complexity of ordinary decision-making in people’s lives.As Nobel laureate Hebert Simon has pointed out,information itself consumes scarce resources.“What information consumes is rather obvious:it consumes the attention of its recipients.Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it”.This consuming effect of information makes the concept of“informed choice”at once more important and at the same time more difficult to achieve in modern society.【8】These examples all serve to illustrate that modern lifestyles are both complex and haunted by paradox.This is certainly one of the reasons why policy makers have tended to shy away from the wholequestion of consumer behavior and lifestyle change.It is clear nonetheless that coming to grips with consumption patterns, understanding the dynamics of lifestyle and influencing people’s attitudes and behaviors are all essential if the kinds of deep environmental targets demanded by sustainable development are to be achieved.英译汉参考译文:直面现代生活方式(节选)文/蒂姆·杰克逊、卡门·史密斯译/裘禾敏很少有人会否认,仅仅数十年间,现代社会就已发生了巨大变化。
第二十六届“韩素音青年翻译奖”竞赛原文

第二十六届“韩素音青年翻译奖”竞赛原文来源:中国译协网英译汉竞赛原文:How the News Got Less MeanThe most read article of all time on BuzzFeed (?)contains no photographs of celebrity nip slips(?)and no inflammatory (煽动性的;激动的)ranting(吼、闹). 译:最具阅读性的文章It’s a series of photos called “21 pictures that will restore your faith in humanity,”只有一系列被称作“21张将让你重拾对人类的信仰的照片”, which has pulled in nearly 14 million visits so far. 到目前为止,这些照片引来了将近一千四百万的观众参观。
At Upworthy too, hope is the major draw.(?)同样在病毒式媒体网站,希望也是“This kid just died. What he left behind is wondtacular,(?)”这个少年刚刚过世,他留给世人的是an Upworthy post about a terminally (处于末期症状上;致命地)ill teen singer, 病毒式媒体网站上关于患有晚期癌症青年歌手的邮件赢得一千五百万人的关注和筹集到三十多万美元来用于癌症研究。
earned 15 million views this summer and has raised more than $300,000 for cancer research.The recipe for attracting visitors to stories online is changing.网上吸引观众关注故事的秘诀正发生改变。
02翻译竞赛英译中参赛原文

附件2翻译竞赛英译中参赛原文Dorothy BushAccording to Burke’s Peerage, there is hardly a family of any American president, however humble its domestic origins, that is not related in some convoluted manner to British royalty. Of them all, however, the Bush family is unquestionably the most regal, tracing its ancestry back to crowned heads in the fourteenth century. As biographer J.H. Hatfield notes, George Herbert Walker Bush is a fourteenth cousin of Queen Elizabeth II. Securely rooted in America’s Eastern establishment, merging ancestry with affluence, this inheritance has been more a challenge than a boon to the Bushes. In three generations of elected leadership, they have consistently downplayed their pedigree and their wealth. Although heritage is no bar to achievement, American voters tend to favor those who “made it” on their own.What was this prototypical Connecticut WASP, so preppy that his nickname is “Poppy”, doing in Texas in the first place? Perhaps there was an element of escape involved —although, unlike Richard Nixon’s longing after train whistles or Bill Clinton’s transcending of a dysfunctional family, Bush’s desire was not so much to leave behind the circumstances of his childhood as to create his own new chapter. Although his father could sometimes be forbidding and his mother more than a bit blunt, Bush loved and respected both his parents and appreciated the foundation they had provided him. When his new life in Texas turned to politics, that, too, was a family tradition. His father, a model of moral rectitude, had left his lucrative Wall Street career to serve in the United States Senate. Public service is valued on both sides of the Bush family. It was a maternal Walker uncle who told a reluctant young George W. Bush that “politics [is] the only occupation worth pursuing.” America has changed a lot since John Adams felt obliged to engage in politics so that his sons and their sons might be able to follow more elevated professions. Despite its aura of scandal and the bloodlust of an intrusive media, public life is still viewed by families like the Bushes as a worthy goal.The parents of George H. W. Bush were not smug snobs or status-conscious clubwomen, but strong individuals intent on their own achievements. Although his mother, Dorothy Walker Bush, faced limitations of caste and gender, she was described by her admiring daughter-in-law Barbara as “the most competitive living human.” Her ancestors, who were originally devout Catholics, arrived on the rugged coast of Maine in the seventeenth century. Moving to the more congenial colony of Maryland, they eventually settled in Missouri and intermingled with families of other denominations. One prominent Walker married a Presbyterian. Over time most of the family accepted the Episcopal ian faith that would be so firmly espoused by Dorothy. The family’s wealth originated in a dry-goods business in St. Louis. Longing to locate at the heart of commerce, Dorothy’s grandfather, George Herbert Walker, put its profits into an investment-banking firm in New York, which eventually became one of the nation’s largest private banks, Brown Brothers Harriman. An avid sportsman, he donated golf’s Walker Cup.The Bushes were equally enterprising and mobile, intertwined, as biographer Herbert Parmet wr ites, with “some of the great landholding families of New York and New England.” George H. W.Bush’s genial grandfather, Samuel, made his fortune not in Manhattan but as an industrialist in Columbus, Ohio. His son Prescott Bush, born in 1895, was sent east to school, to Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and later to Yale, initiating a family tradition. Settling first in Milton, Massachusetts, Prescott made his own fortune as a Wall Street banker. The words used most often to characterize him a re “imposing,” “stern,” and “commanding.” He grew to six feet, four inches, with a full head of black hair. Parmet describes him as “austere, regal, dignified, and imperious” —a classic authority figure. He loved children, however, and would have five, although most of the day-to-day childrearing was always in the hands of his wife, Dorothy, whom he would marry in 1921 at the Church of Saint Ann in Kennebunkport, Maine.Had she been born a generation or two later, Dorothy Walker might have had a dazzling career of her own. She was the fire to her husband’s ice —outgoing, amusing, outspoken, and adventuresome, yet very much a lady. A proper marriage for her was the preoccupation of Dorothy’s protective parents, who still lived in St. Louis. After atte nding private schools, she was sent east for “finishing” at Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut, in preparation for her presentation to society. Called “Dottie,” she particularly excelled in athletics. In 1918 she was runner-up in the girls’ national tennis tournament. She was so gifted an athlete that even at the age of thirty-nine, a mother of five, she took a set from a lady who had lost in the national tennis finals to the legendary Alice Marble.They were a handsome couple, Dorothy and Prescott Bush, although she was the more cheerful and sociable. Their first son, named for his father, was born after the frantic hospital ride in 1922. Two years later, their second son was horn, and named George Herbert Walker Bush, representing both f amilies. His grandfather Walker called him “Little Pop,” which became “Poppy.” There would be two more boys, and a welcome girl, Nancy. As Prescott’s investment house prospered, merged, and moved to Manhattan, the family relocated to a larger, comfortably unostentatious home in Greenwich, Connecticut.选自:Faith of Our Mothers 作者:Harold Gullan。
第23届韩素音青年翻译奖竞赛汉译英原文

汉译英竞赛原文:摩天大楼指数——如影随形的经济危机作为一种以巨大的经济力量为支撑的建筑物,摩天大楼常被民众和政客视为展示经济繁荣、社会进步的标志。
有些经济学家则持完全相反的看法,认为摩天大楼的出现,特别是摩天大楼的纪录被刷新,往往预示着经济即将衰退。
“高楼建成之日,即是市场衰退之时”,这是德意志银行的证券分析师安德鲁·劳伦斯于1999年发表的判言。
2006年2月15日,雷曼兄弟公司在北京召开全球经济会议,其全球首席经济学家卢埃林向我国客户提及“摩天大楼指数”的预言:“如果全球有发生经济危机的可能性,那很可能会在2007年或2008年。
”雷曼的首席经济学家预见了2007年到2008年的经济危机,但却不曾想到,雷曼的百年基业正是在这场危机中化为泡影。
对于经济而言,摩天大楼是荣耀还是诅咒?其与经济危机之间是否真的存在这样密切的联系呢?1999年,安德鲁·劳伦斯经过研究验证了摩天大楼与经济危机的关联,并将这种关联称为“摩天大楼指数”。
每一幢刷新世界纪录的摩天大楼的崛起,往往都伴随着经济的衰退。
自20世纪初以来,全球共出现了四轮摩天大楼热,而每一次,都伴随着经济危机或金融动荡。
20世纪20年代,美国经济转好,证券市场再度空前繁荣,民用、商用房产建设高歌猛进。
这期间,三座刷新纪录的摩天大楼先后兴建。
纽约的华尔街40号、克莱斯勒大厦和帝国大厦相继于1929年至1931年的三年中落成,但随之而来的不是新的繁荣,而是空前的大萧条。
在经历了被美国人称之为“黄金时代”的20世纪60年代强劲、持续的经济繁荣后,纽约的世贸中心和芝加哥的西尔斯大厦开始兴建。
1972年和1974年,两座再次刷新世界纪录的摩天大楼相继落成,随后,全球经济发生了严重滞胀。
摩天大楼与经济危机的关联如此密切,很难用巧合来理解,那么究竟是什么原因让经济危机总是与摩天大楼如影随形呢?首先,人性使然。
人性当中有盲目自信的一面。
具体体现在对客观事物认识不足,偏执于对事物的主观看法上。
2020中译国青杯英译汉原文

“中译国青杯”联合国文件翻译大赛学生组——英译汉【原文】Australia: Where Nature is Grieving“When you walk into a forest that’s been burnt this badly, the overwhelming thing that hits you is the silence. No bird-song. No rus tling of leaves. Silence.” This is how Mike Clarke, professor of zoology at La Trobe University, Melbourne, describes Australia’s many forests recently decimated by bushfires.“This stands out as the worst disaster in Australia’s recorded history,” Clarke says. The figure of the area that has been burnt – 13 million hectares –is “hard to get your head around.” For scale, this is an area bigger in hectares than Holland, Denmark and Switzerland combined. All burnt to a crisp. Homes, forests, animals, plants –everything in the wake of these intense infernos – incinerated. Gone.Unprecedented scaleAt least a billion animals were killed in the bushfires, according to approximate estimates by Chris Dickman, professor in territorial ecology at The University of Sydney. This figure is conservative, Clarke believes. “That’s just mammals, birds, reptiles. If we added invertebrates to that, the numbers would be astronomical.”One thing that must be clear, though, is that Australia’s bush has always burnt quite s everely. “The severity isn’t unprecedented,” says Alan York, professor of Fire Ecology at the University of Melbourne. “What is unprecedented is their earliness in, or before the usual fire season, and the volume of fires in so many places, which is far mo re unusual.”Koalas in northern New South Wales have had most of their habitat burnt. “Speculation is that populations will become locally extinct,” according to York. The iconic nature of the koalas sometimes overshadows other ecosystem horrors, Clarke ad ds. “They’re the poster child of this crisis. But in reality, a whole suite of wildlife – large possums, all sorts of plants that live in alpine ash, whole communities of organisms – are all at risk now.”The resilience of the Australian bush in questionIt may take years for these species to recover. And that may require human assistance, with captive-bred frogs in Australia’s zoos, for example. “Otherwise, we’re hoping animals survived in unburnt pockets,” York explains. He remains somewhat optimistic, s aying the Australian bush has a “dramatic capacity to recover.”There are, however, caveats. Rainforests and alpine areas of Tasmania, for instance, don’t have much experience of fires, so they’re more vulnerable to repeated fires, he says. And under the current climate change model, increasing fires are inevitable.Some of several “human interferences” that’ll most likely hamper recovery include habitat removal from land clearing; introducing feral species which prey on native species (feral cats have been known to come from ten kilometres away to the edge of a fire to pick off prey, usually native); and a lack of urgent political action on climate change.The problem is, lots of critical resources have been incinerated. For example, many fauna – cockatoos, parrots, possums, bats – rely on hollow logs on the ground, or on trees to den in or breed in. Not only have those logs now gone, Clarke predicts that it will take one to two centuries for them to appear again, hollowed out. “A lot of Australian wood is hardwood. Fungi and termites hollow it really slowly. There are no woodpeckers here,” he explains. Suddenly, the capacity to recover seems almost insurmountable within our lifetime. “What could disappear in hours in bushfire could take centuries to replace. Ecologists would call this a ‘complete state change’.”Immediate measures neededExperts say some immediate steps are being taken to help along the recovery of this vast area. A moratorium on logging has been proposed, and pressure is building to act more aggressively on the pest control of feral cats and foxes, in addition to introducing weed removal. “Weeds recolonize areas disturbed by fire. They use resources that native plants and animals might need,” York explains.Identifying and protecting areas that did not burn is also an important subject for debate. Specifically, some are arguing that cultural burns may be better than the hotter, more intense, hazard reduction burning. Cultural burns are cool-burning, knee-high blazes that were designed to happen continuously and across the landscape, practised by indigenous people long before Australia’s invasion and colonization. The fires burn up fuel like kindling and leaf detritus, so that a natural bushfire has less to devour.Since Australia's fire crisis began last year, calls for better reintegration of this technique have grown louder. But they may be of limited value at this crisis point, according to Clarke. “We need to appreciate how different things are now. Cultural burns happened to enable people to move through dense vegetation easily, or for ceremonial reasons. They weren’t burning around 25 million people, criss-crossed by complex infrastructure and in a climate change scenario,” he estimates.Concrete measures to combat climate change are indeed crucial for the future of biodiversity. In spite of green shoots of optimism in some quarters, the prognosis of whether the bush will ever recover its biodiversity is looking somewhat grim. Breaking it down, Clarke surmises that “A chunk of it will be good – a third will be able to bounce back. A third is in question, but a third is in serious trouble. I’ve been studyingfire ecology for twenty years, but we’re de aling with unchartered territory changing before our eyes.”【参赛译文格式要求】一、参赛译文应为Word文档.doc或.docx格式。
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英译汉竞赛原文:How the News Got Less MeanThe most read article of all time on BuzzFeed contains no photographs of celebrity nip slips and no inflammatory ranting. It’s a series of photos called “21 pictures that will restore your faith in humanity,” which has pulled in nearly 14 million visits so far. At Upworthy too, hope is the major draw. “This kid just died. What he left behind is wondtacular,” an Upworthy post about a terminally ill teen singer, earned 15 million views this summer and has raised more than $300,000 for cancer research.The recipe for attracting visitors to stories online is changing. Bloggers have traditionally turned to sarcasm and snark to draw attention. But the success of sites like BuzzFeed and Upworthy, whose philosophies embrace the viral nature of upbeat stories, hints that the Web craves positivity.The reason: social media. Researchers are discovering that people want to create positive images of themselves online by sharing upbeat stories. And with more people turning to Facebook and Twitter to find out what’s happening in the world, news stories may need to cheer up in order to court an audience. If social is the future of media, then optimistic stories might be media’s future.“When we started, the prevailing wisdom was that snark ruled the Internet,”says Eli Pariser, a co-founder of Upworthy. “And we just had a really different sense of what works.”“You don’t want to be that guy at the party who’s crazy and angry and ranting in the corner — it’s the same for Twitter or Facebook,” he says. “Part of what we’re trying to do with Upworthy is give people the tools to express a conscientious, thoughtful and positive identity in social media.”And the science appears to support Pariser’s philosophy. In a recent study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, researchers found that “up votes,”showing that a visitor liked a comment or story, begat more up votes on comments on the site, but “down votes” did not do the same. In fact, a single up vote increased the likelihood that someone else would like a comment by 32%, whereas a down vote had no effect. People don’t want to support the cranky commenter, the critic or the troll. Nor do they want to be that negative personality online.In another study published in 2012, Jonah Berger, author of Contagious: Why Things Catch On and professor of marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, monitored the most e-mailed stories produced by the New York Times for six months and found that positive stories were more likely to make the list than negative ones.“What we share [or like] is almost like the car we drive or the clothes we wear,” he says. “It says something about us to other people. So people would much rather be seen as a Positive Polly than a Debbie Downer.”It’s not always that simple: Berger says that though positive pieces drew more traffic than negative ones, within the categories of positive and negative stories, those articles that elicited more emotion always led to more shares.“Take two negative emotions, for example: anger and sadness,” Berger says. “Both of those emotions would make the reader feel bad. But anger, a high arousal emotion, leads to more sharing, whereas sadness, a low arousal emotion, doesn’t. The same is true of the positive side: excitement and humor increase sharing, whereas contentment decreases sharing.”And while some popular BuzzFeed posts — like the recent “Is this the most embarrassing interview Fox News has ever done?”— might do their best to elicit shares through anger, both BuzzFeed and Upworthy recognize that their main success lies in creating positive viral material.“It’s not that people don’t share negative stories,” says Jack Shepherd, editorial director at BuzzFeed. “It just means that there’s a higher potential for positive stories to do well.”Upworthy’s mission is to highlight serious issues but in a hopeful way, encouraging readers to donate money, join organizations and take action. The strategy seems to be working: barely two years after its launch date (in March 2012), the site now boasts 30 million unique visitors per month, according to Upworthy. The site’s average monthly unique visitors grew to 14 million people over its first six quarters — to put that in perspective, the Huffington Post had only about 2 million visitors in its first six quarters online.But Upworthy measures the success of a story not just by hits. The creators of the site only consider a post a success if it’s also shared frequently on social media. “We are interested in content that people want to share partly for pragmaticreasons,” Pariser says. “If you don’t have a good theory about how to appear in Facebook and Twitter, then you may disappear.”Nobody has mastered the ability to make a story go viral like BuzzFeed. The site, which began in 2006 as a lab to figure out what people share online, has used what it’s learned to draw 60 million monthly unique visitors, according to BuzzFeed. (Most of that traffic comes from social-networking sites, driving readers toward BuzzFeed’s mix of cute animal photos and hard news.) By comparison the New York Times website, one of the most popular newspaper sites on the Web, courts only 29 million unique visitors each month, according to the Times.BuzzFeed editors have found that people do still read negative or critical stories, they just aren’t the posts they share with their friends. And those shareable posts are the ones that newsrooms increasingly prize.“Anecdotally, I can tell you people are just as likely to click on negative stories as they are to click on positive ones,” says Shepherd. “But they’re more likely to share positive stories. What you’re interested in is different from what you want your friends to see what you’re interested in.”So as newsrooms re-evaluate how they can draw readers and elicit more shares on Twitter and Facebook, they may look to BuzzFeed’s and Upworthy’s happiness model for direction.“I think that the Web is only becoming more social,” Shepherd says. “We’re at a point where readers are your publishers. If news sites aren’t thinking about what it would mean for someone to share a story on social media, that could be detrimental.”汉译英竞赛原文:城市的迷失沿着瑗珲—腾冲线,这条1935年由胡焕庸先生发现并命名的中国人口、自然和历史地理的分界线,我们看到,从远距离贸易发展开始的那天起,利益和权力的渗透与分散,已经从根本结构上改变了城市的状态:城市在膨胀,人在疏离。