英语翻译二级笔译实务模拟试题及答案解析(1)

英语翻译二级笔译实务模拟试题及答案解析（1）

(1/2)Section ⅠEnglish-Chinese Translation

Translate the following two passages into Chinese.

Part A Compulsory Translation

第1题

"Wisdom of the Crowd": The Myths and Realities

Are the many wiser than the few? Phil Ball explores the latest evidence on what can make groups of people smarter—but can also make them wildly wrong.

Is The Lord of the Rings the greatest work of literature of the 20th Century? Is The Shawshank Redemption the best movie ever made? Both have been awarded these titles by public votes. You don't have to be a literary or film snob to wonder about the wisdom of so-called "wisdom of the crowd",

In an age routinely denounced as selfishly individualistic, it's curious that a great deal of faith still seems to lie with the judgment of the crowd, especially when it can apparently be far off the mark. Yet there is some truth underpinning the idea that the masses can make more accurate collective judgments than expert individuals. So why is a crowd sometimes right and sometimes disastrously wrong?

The notion that a group's judgement can be surprisingly good was most compellingly justified in James Surowiecki's 2005 book The Wisdom of Crowds, and is generally traced back to an observation by Charles Darwin's cousin Francis Galton in 1907. Galton pointed out that the average of all the entries in a "guess the weight of the ox" competition at a country fair was amazingly accurate—beating not only most of the individual guesses but also those of alleged cattle experts. This is the essence of the wisdom of crowds: their average judgment converges on the right solution.

Still, Surowiecki also pointed out that the crowd is far from infallible. He explained that one requirement for a good crowd judgement is that people's decisions are independent of one another. If everyone let themselves be influenced by each other's guesses, there's more chance that the guesses will drift towards a misplaced bias. This undermining effect of social influence was demonstrated in 2011 by a team at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. They asked groups of participants to estimate certain quantities in geography or crime, about which none of them could be expected to have perfect knowledge but all could hazard a guess—the length of the Swiss-Italian border, for example, or the annual number of murders in Switzerland. The participants were offered modest financial rewards for good group guesses, to make sure they took the challenge seriously.

The researchers found that, as the amount of information participants were given about each other's guesses increased, the range of their guesses got narrower, and the centre of this range could drift further from the true value. In other words, the groups were tending towards a consensus, to the detriment of accuracy.

This finding challenges a common view in management and politics that it is best to seek consensus in group decision making. What you can end up with instead is herding towards a relatively arbitrary position. Just how arbitrary depends on what kind of pool of opinions you start off with, according to subsequent work by one of the ETH team, Frank Schweitzer, and his colleagues. They say that if the group generally has good initial judgement, social influence can refine rather than degrade their collective decision.