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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.。
第23届"韩素音青年翻译奖"竞赛译文4：如何翻译“vicious cycle”?高斋翻译TransElegant整理的CATTI和MTI备考资料英译汉Are We There Yet?我们到了吗？In an ideal world America would commit itself now to the medium-term tax reforms and spending cuts needed to get a grip on the budget, while leaving room to keep fiscal policy loose for the moment. But in febrile, partisan Washington that is a pipe-dream. Today’s goals can only be more modest: to nurture the weak economy, minimize uncertainty and prepare the ground for tomorrow’s fiscal debate. To that end, Congress ought to extend all the Bush tax cuts until 2013. Then they should all expire—prompting a serious fiscal overhaul, at a time when the economy is stronger.一种理想的情况是，美国应着手中期税收改革，削减政府开支以控制预算，并为继续保持一段时期的宽松政策留出空间。
但在党派纷争激烈的华盛顿，这种理想简直是白日做梦。
时至今日，政府只能调低目标，呵护脆弱的经济，尽量消除不确定性，并为日后两党就财政问题展开辩论做好准备。
英译汉竞赛原文：The Concep t of Intell igenc e in Cross-cultur al Perspe ctive s[1] One of the positi ve outcom es from so much resear ch on the relati onshi p betwee n cultur e and intell igenc e is an expand ed view of what intell igenc e may be, and how it may be concep tuall y relate d to cultur e. This issueis intric ately intert wined with cross-cultur al resear ch on intell igenc e becaus e one of the possib le confou nding factor s in previo us studie s that docume ntedcultur al differ ences has been cultur al differ ences in the very concep t and meanin g of intell igenc e.[2] Resear chers in this area have discov eredthat many langua ges have no word that corres ponds to our idea of intell igenc e. The closes t Mandar in equiva lent, for instan ce, is a Chines e charac ter that means“good brainand talent ed”. Chines e people oftenassoci ate this concep t with traits such as imitat ion, effort, and social respon sibil ity. Such traits do not consti tuteimport ant elemen ts of the concep t of intell igenc e for most Americ ans.[3] Africa n cultur es provid e a number of exampl es. The Bagand a of East Africa use the word obugez i to referto a combin ation of mental and social skills that make a person steady, cautio us, and friend ly. The Djerma-Songha i in West Africa use the term akkal, whichhas an even broade r meanin g – a combin ation of intell igenc e, know-how, and social skills. Stillanothe r societ y, the Baoule, uses the term n’glouel e, whichdescri bes childr en who are not only mental ly alertbut also willin g to volunt eer theirservic es withou t beingasked.[4] Becaus e of the enormo us differ ences in the ways cultur es define intell igenc e, it is diffic ult to make validcompar isons from one societ y to anothe r. That is, differ ent cultur es valuediffer ent traits (theirdefini tionof “intell igenc e”) and have diverg ent viewsconcer ningwhichtraits are useful in predic tingfuture import ant behavi ors (also cultur allydefine d). People in differ ent cultur es not only disagr ee aboutwhat consti tutes intell igenc e but also aboutthe proper way to demons trate thoseabilit ies. In mainst reamNorthAmeric an societ y, indivi duals are typica lly reward ed for displa yingknowle dge and skills. This same behavi or may be consid eredimprop er, arroga nt, or rude in societ ies that stress person al relati onshi ps, cooper ation, and modest y.[5] Thesediffer ences are import ant to cross-cultur al studie s of intell igenc e becaus e succes sfulperfor mance on a task of intell igenc e may requir e behavi or that is consid eredimmode st and arroga nt in Cultur e A (and theref ore only reluct antly displa yed by member s of Cultur e A)but desira ble in Cultur e B (and theref ore readil y displa yed by member s of Cultur e B). Clearl y, such differ ent attitu des toward the same behavi or couldlead resear chers to draw inaccu rateconclu sions aboutdiffer ences in intell igenc e betwee n Cultur e A and Cultur e B.[6] Anothe r reason it is diffic ult to compar e intell igenc e cross-cultur allyis that testsof intell igenc e oftenrely on knowle dge that is specif ic to a partic ularcultur e; invest igato rs basedin that cultur e may not even know what to test for in a differ ent cultur e. For exampl e, one U.S. intell igenc e test contai ns the follow ing questi on: “How does a violin resemb le a piano?” Clearl y, this questi on assume s priorknowle dge aboutviolin s and pianos–quitea reason ableexpect ation for middle-classAmeric ans, but not for people from cultur es that use differ ent musica l instru ments.[7] Our expand ing knowle dge aboutcultur al differ ences in the concep t of intell igenc e has had import ant ramifi catio ns for our theore tical unders tandi ng of intell igenc e in mainst reamAmeric an psycho logyas well. Althou gh tradit ional thinki ng and reason ing abilit ies have domina ted viewsof intell igenc e in the past, in recent yearspsycho logis ts have begunto turn theirattent ion to otherpossib le aspect s of intell igenc e. Untilvery recent ly, for exampl e, creati vitywas not consid ereda part of intell igenc e; now, howeve r, psycho logis ts are increa singl y consid ering this import ant humanabilit y as a type of intell igenc e. Otheraspect s of intell igenc e are also coming to the forefr ont. A psycho logis t has sugges ted that thereare really sevendiffer ent typesof intell igenc e: logica l mathem atica l, lingui stic,musica l, spatia l, bodily kinest hetic, interp erson al, and intrap erson al. Accord ing to this scheme, not only do the core compon entsof each of theseseventypesof intell igenc e differ, but so do some sample end-states(such as mathem atici an versus dancer). His theory of multip leintell igenc es has broade ned our unders tandi ng of intell igenc e to includ e otherareasbeside s “book smarts”.[8] Perhap s the fieldis coming to realiz e that intell igenc e in its broade st sensemay be more aptlydefine d as “the skills and abilit ies necess ary to effect ively accomp lishcultur al goals”. If your cultur e’s goals,for exampl e, involv e succes sfull y pursui ng a profes siona l occupa tionwith a good salary in orderto suppor t yourse lf and your family, that cultur e will foster a view of intell igenc e that incorp orate s cognit ive and emotio nal skills and abilit ies that allowfor pursui ng such an occupa tion. Thoseskills and abilit ies may includ e deduct ive reason ing, logica l though t, verbal and mathem atica l skills– the sortsof skills that are foster ed in contem porar y Americ an cultur e. If your cultur e’s goals,howeve r, focusmore on the develo pment and mainte nance of succes sfulinterp erson al relati onshi ps, workin g with nature, or huntin g and gather ing, intell igenc e will more aptlybe viewed as the skills and abilit ies relate d to such activi ties.[9] On one level,theref ore, people of all cultur es sharea simila r view of intell igenc e –a catcha ll concep t that summar izesthe skills and abilit ies necess ary to live effect ively in one’s cultur e. At the same time, howeve r, cultur al differ ences natura lly existbecaus e of differ ences in how cultur es define goalsand skills and abilit ies needed to achiev e thosegoals.Future resear ch will need to delveinto thesedual proces ses, search ing for common aliti es as well as differ ences across cultur es and explor ing what contex tualvariab les affect intell igenc e-relate d behavi ors, and why.[10] Awaren ess of cultur al differ ences in intell igenc e raises diffic ult questi ons concer ningtestin g and the use of test scores. Should bias in testin g be elimin atedat the expens e of the predic tivevalidi ty of the test? Many educat ional instit ution s and busine ss organi zatio ns todayface this diffic ult questi on, whichis compou ndedby legalramifi catio ns and the consta nt threat of litiga tion. Perhap s we need to give consid erati on to yet anothe r aspect of intell igenc e – that is, our attitu des regard ing intell igenc e. A cross-cultur al unders tandi ng of differ ences in the defini tions and proces ses of intell igenc e should help to deepen our apprec iatio n and respec t for cultur es differ ent from our own, and help us to find simila ritie s as well as differ ences amongpeople.。
第23届"韩素音青年翻译奖"竞赛译文5：如何翻译“Payroll-tax cuts”?高斋翻译TransElegant整理的CATTI和MTI备考资料英译汉Are We There Yet?我们到了吗？Cleaning up the housing market would help cut America’s unemployment rate, by making it easier for people to move to where jobs are. But more must be done to stop high joblessness becoming entrenched. Payroll-tax cuts and credits to reduce the cost of hiring would help. (The health-care reform, alas, does the opposite, at least for small businesses.) Politicians will also have to think harder about training schemes, because some workers lack the skills that new jobs require.清理房市有利于人们把家搬往能够找到工作的地方，从而有助于降低美国的失业率。
但为了防止高失业率积重难返，政府需要做的工作还有许多。
可以减免和抵免工资所得税以降低企业的雇佣成本将有助于降低失业率。
（至少医疗保健改革，哼，效果只会适得其反，至少对小企业是这样。
）政客们还需要就职业培训计划多动动脑子，因为一些工人缺乏新近出现的工作所需要的技能。
Americans are used to great distances. The sooner they, and their politicians, accept that the road to recovery will be a long one, the faster they will get there.美国人早已习惯了长途跋涉。
Outing A.I.: Beyond the Turing TestThe idea of measuring A.I. by its ability to “pass” as a human – dramatized in countless sci- fi films – is actually as old as modern A.I. research itself. It is traceable at least to 1950 when the British mathematician Alan Turing published “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” a paper in which he described what we now call the “Turing Test,” and which he referred to as the “imitation game.” There are different versions of the test, all of which are revealing as to why our approach to the culture and ethics of A.I. is what it is, for good and bad. For the most familiar version, a human interrogator asks questions of two hidden contestants, one a human and the other a computer. Turing suggests that if the interrogator usually cannot tell which is which, and if the computer can successfully pass as human, then can we not conclude, for practical purposes, that the computer is “intelligent”?More people “know” Turing’s foundational text than have actually read it. This is unfortunate because the text is marvelous, strange and surprising. Turing introduces his test as a variation on a popular parlor game in which two hidden contestants, a woman (player A) and a man (player B) try to convince a third that he or she is a woman by their written responses to leading questions. To win, one of the players must convincingly be who they really are, whereas the other must try to pass as another gender. Turing describes his own variation as one where “a computer takes the place of player A,” and so a literal reading would suggest that in his version the computer is not just pretending to be a human, but pretending to be a woman. It must pass as a she.Passing as a person comes down to what others see and interpret. Because everyone else is already willing to read others according to conventional cues (of race, sex, gender, species, etc.) the complicity between whoever (or whatever) is passing and those among which he or she or it performs is what allows passing to succeed. Whether or not an A.I. is trying to pass as a human or is merely in drag as a human is another matter. Is the ruse all just a game or, as for some people who are compelled to pass in their daily lives, an essential camouflage? Either way, “passing” may say more about the audience than about the performers.That we would wish to define the very existence of A.I. in relation to its ability to mimic how humans think that humans think will be looked back upon as a weird sort of speciesism. The legacy of that conceit helped to steer some older A.I. research down disappointingly fruitless paths, hoping to recreate human minds from available parts. It just doesn’t work that way. Contemporary A.I. research suggests instead that the threshold by which any particular arrangement of matter can be said to be “intelligent” doesn’t have much to do with how it reflects humanness back at us. As Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig (now director of research at Google) suggest in their essential A.I. textbook, biomorphic imitation is not how we design complex technology. Airplanes don’t fly like birds fly, and we certainly don’t try to trick birds into thinking that airplanes are birds in order to test whether those planes “really” are flying machines. Why do it for A.I. then? Today’s serious A.I. research does not focus on the Turing Test as an objective criterion of success, and yet in our popular culture of A.I., the test’s anthropocentrism holds such durable conceptual importance. Like the animals who talk like teenagers in a Disney movie, other minds are conceivable mostly by way of puerile ventriloquism.Where is the real injury in this? If we want everyday A.I. to be congenial in a humane sort of way, so what? The answer is that we have much to gain from a more sincere and disenchanted relationship to synthetic intelligences, and much to lose by keeping illusions on life support. Some philosophers write about the possible ethical “rights” of A.I. as sentient entities, but that’s not my point here. Rather, the truer perspective is also the better one for us as thinking technical creatures.Musk, Gates and Hawking made headlines by speaking to the dangers that A.I. may pose. Their points are important, but I fear were largely misunderstood by many readers. Relying on efforts to program A.I. not to “harm humans” (inspired by Isaac Asimov’s “three laws” of robotics from 1942) makes sense only when an A.I. knows what humans are and what harming them might mean. There are many ways that an A.I. might harm us that have nothing to do with its malevolence toward us, and chief among these is exactly following our well-meaning instructions to an idiotic and catastrophic extreme. Instead of mechanical failure or a transgression of moral code, the A.I. maypose an existential risk because it is both powerfully intelligent and disinterested in humans. To the extent that we recognize A.I. by its anthropomorphic qualities, or presume its preoccupation with us, we are vulnerable to those eventualities.Whether or not “hard A.I.” ever appears, the harm is also in the loss of all that we prevent ourselves from discovering and understanding when we insist on protecting beliefs we know to be false. In the 1950 essay, Turing offers several rebuttals to his speculative A.I., including a striking comparison with earlier objections to Copernican astronomy. Copernican traumas that abolish the false centrality and absolute specialness of human thought and species-being are priceless accomplishments. They allow for human culture based on how the world actually is more than on how it appears to us from our limited vantage point. Turing referred to these as “theological objections,” but one could argue that the anthropomorphic precondition for A.I. is a “pre-Copernican” attitude as well, however secular it may appear. The advent of robust inhuman A.I. may let us achieve another disenchantment, one that should enable a more reality-based understanding of ourselves, our situation, and a fuller and more complex understanding of what “intelligence” is and is not. From there we can hopefully make our world with a greater confidence that our models are good approximations of what’s out there.人工智能：超越图灵实验以人工智能“冒充”人的能力的来衡量人工智能的这个概念---已经被数不清的科幻电影搬上了荧幕---实际上已经和现代人工智能研究一样久远了。
2017年第三届“LSCAT杯”江苏省笔译大赛竞赛汉译英译文“What I expected most was a person covered with white cloth, who was holding a rodlike snake spirit overhead, next was someone putting on yellow cotton garment and playing the tiger jump”. This is a lifelike description on the traditional opera by the novel of LuXun——Village Opera. Watching the Village Opera is traditionally a cultural activity suitable for all ages. Not only does it offer an opera performance to the spectator, but also serves the functions of social communication, commercial trade and cultural transmission for residents.At present, there are two extreme developing orientations for traditional opera. On one hand, precious few main operas such as BeiJing Opera and KunQu Opera are generally acknowledged as elegant arts. The professional performing agencies supported by the government maintain their higher artistic levels. In addition,the attention focused by the intelligentsia increases their property of refined culture. T hey are highly valued as a visiting card of Chinese traditional culture. On the other hand, large amounts of folk operas survive in the folklore. They enjoy neither abundant financial backing, nor any professional performing teams.Although some locations attempt to preserve these kinds of operas, more measures are acting a way like museum style, which makes them lose their vitality as fossils.If traditional operas prefer to target at new spectators especially the young, they are supposed to keep up with the time on the basis of holding their essence. Since culture is always keeping in a dynamic process, keeping the incomplete will isolate the culture from the world. Styles of salvage and specimen, ofcourse, are essential under particular situation. However, both the two ways might be arduous but fruitless; at least they can’t achieve the initial expectation of culture transmission. For the sake of preserving and propagating the traditional opera arts, we are obliged to transform the coming force to focus on the opera by attracting the active intellectuals in the folklore, performing lovers and the spectators to get involved, especially providing opportunities to attract the young. A photo, a video, a cartoon or even a WeChat post would possibly become a turning point for the developing of the traditional operas. Actually, young people are not indifferent with the traditional art, they just live in a “cosmos”differ from the traditional operas.In order to heave the traditional o pera into young people’s vision, we’d better to change the mode of discourse initiatively and let it sing loudly in the cosmos of the young.。
第十七届韩素音翻译大赛英译汉部分原文Beauty (excerpt)Judging from the scientists I know, including Eva and Ruth, and those I’ve read about, you can’t pursue the laws of nature very long without bumping into beauty. “I don’t know if it’s the same beauty you see in the sunset,” a friend tells me, “but it feels the same.” This friend is a physicist, who has spent a long career deciphering what must be happening in the interior of stars. He recalls for me this thrill on grasping for the first time Dirac’s equations describing quantum mechanics, or those of Einstein describing relativity. “They’re so beautiful,” he says,” you can see immediately they have to be true. Or at least on the way toward trut h.” I ask him what makes a theory beautiful, and he replies, “Simplicity, symmetry, elegance, and power.”Why nature should conform to theories we find beautiful is far from obvious. The most incomprehensible thing about the universe, as Einstein said, is that it’s comprehensible. How unlikely, that a short—lived biped on a two--bit planet should be able to gauge the speed of light, lay bare the structure of an atom, or calculate the gravitational tug of a black hole. We’re a long way from understanding everything, but we do understand a great deal about how nature behaves. Generation after generation, we puzzle out formulas, test them, and find, to an astonishing degree, that nature agrees. An architect draws designs on flimsy paper, and her buildings stand up through earthquakes. We launch a satellite into orbit and use it to bounce messages from continent to continent. The machine on which I write these words embodies hundreds of insights into the workings of the material world, insights that are confirmed by every burst of letters on the screen, and I stare at thatscreen through lenses that obey the laws of optics first worked out in detail by Issac Newton.By discerning patterns in the universe, Newton believed, he was tracing the hand of God. Scientists in our day have largely abandoned the notion of a Creator as an unnecessary hypothesis, or at least an untestable one. While they share Newton’s faith that t he universe is ruled everywhere by a coherent set of rules, they cannot say, as scientists, how these particular rules came to govern things. You can do science without believing in a divine Legislator, but not without believing in laws.I spent my teenage years scrambling up the mountain of mathematics. Midway up the slope, I staggered to a halt, gasping in the rarefied air, well before I reached the heights where the equations of Einstein and Dirac would have made sense. Nowadays I add, subtract, multiply, and do long division when no calculator is handy, and I can do algebra and geometry and even trigonometry in a pinch, but that is about all that I’ve kept from the language of numbers. Still, I remember glimpsing patterns in mathematics that seemed as bold and beautiful as a skyful of stars.I’m never more aware of the limitations of language than when I try to describe beauty. Language can create its own loveliness, of course, but it cannot deliver to us the radiance we apprehend in the world, any more than a photograph can capture the stunning swiftness of a hawk or the withering power of a supernova. Eva’s wedding album holds only a faint glimmer of the wedding itself. All that pictures or words can do is gesture beyond themselves toward the fleeting glory that stirs our hearts. So I keep gesturing.“All nature is meant to make us think of paradise,”Thomas Merton observed. Because the Creation puts on a nonstop show, beauty is free and inexhaustible, but we need training in order to perceive more than the most obvious kinds. Even 15 billion years or so after the Big Bang, echoes of that event still linger in the form of background radiation, only a few degrees above absolute zero. Just so, I believe, the experience of beauty is an echo of the order and power that permeate the universe. To measure background radiation, we need subtle instruments; to measure beauty, we need alert intelligence and our five keen senses.Anyone with eyes can take delight in a face or a flower. You need training, however, to perceive the beauty in mathematics or physics or chess, in the architecture of a tree, the design of a bird’s wing, or the shiver of breath through a flute. For most of human history, the training has come from elders who taught the young how to pay attention. By paying attention, we learn to savor all sorts of patterns, from quantum mechanics to patchwork quilts. This predilection brings with it a clear evolutionary advantage, for the ability to recognize patterns helped our ancestors to select mates, find food, avoid predators. But the same advantage would apply to all species, and yet we alone compose symphonies and crossword puzzles, carve stone into statues, map time and space.Have we merely carried our animal need for shrewd perceptions to an absurd extreme? Or have we stumbled onto a deep congruence between the structure of our minds and the structure of the universe?I am persuaded the latter is true. I am convinced there’s more to beauty than biology, more than cultural convention. It flows around and through us in such abundance, and in such myriad forms, as to exceed by a wide margin any mereevolutionary need. Which is not to say that beauty has nothing to do with survival: I think it has everything to do with survival. Beauty feeds us from the same source that created us. It reminds us of the shaping power that reaches through the flower stem and through our own hands. It restores our faith in the generosity of nature. By giving us a taste of the kinship between our own small minds and the great Mind of the Cosmos, beauty reassures us that we are exactly and wonderfully made for life on this glorious planet, in this magnificent universe.I find in that affinity a profound source of meaning and hope.A universe so prodigal of beauty may actually need us to notice and respond, may need our sharp eyes and brimming hearts and teeming minds, in order to close the circuit of Creation.美在其中（节选）我认识的科学家，像伊凡和卢斯，还有我通过阅读了解的科学家，普遍认为人们在探索自然界规律的过程中，很快便能与美不期而遇。
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 inorder 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 Twitteror Facebook,”he says. “Part of what we’re trying to d o 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 f ound 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%, wherea s 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 andfound 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 th ough 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 moresharing, whereas sadness, a low arousal emotion, doesn’t. The same is true of the positive side: excitement and humor increase sharing, whereas conte ntment 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 ahigher 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 pragmatic reasons,”Pariser s ays. “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 onlin e, has used what it’s learned to draw 60million 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 t hey 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 m ore 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。
英译汉竞赛原文：Are We There Yet?America’s recovery will be much slower than that from most recessions; but the governmentcan help a bit.“WHITHER goest thou, America?” That question, posed by Jack Kerouac on behalf of the Beat generation half a century ago, is the biggest uncertainty hanging over the world economy. And it reflects the foremost worry for American voters, who go to the polls for the congressional mid-term elections on November 2nd with the country’s unemployment rate stubbornly stuck at nearly one in ten. They should prepare themselves for a long, hard ride.The most wrenching recession since the 1930s ended a year ago. But the recovery—none too powerful to begin with—slowed sharply earlier this year. GDP grew by a feeble 1.6% at an annual pace in the second quarter, and seems to have been stuck somewhere similar since. The housing market slumped after temporary tax incentives to buy a home expired. So few private jobs were being created that unemployment looked more likely to rise than fall. Fears grew over the summer that if this deceleration continued, America’s economy would slip back into recession.Fortunately, those worries now seem exaggerated. Part of the weakness of second-quarter GDP was probably because of a temporary surge in imports from China. The latest statistics, from reasonably good retail sales in August to falling claims for unemployment benefits, point to an economy that, though still weak, is not slumping further. And history suggests that although nascent recoveries often wobble for a quarter or two, they rarely relapse into recession. For now, it is most likely that America’s economy will crawl along with growth at perhaps 2.5%: above stall speed, but far too slow to make much difference to the jobless rate.Why, given th at America usually rebounds from recession, are the prospects so bleak? That’s because most past recessions have been caused by tight monetary policy. When policy is loosened, demand rebounds. This recession was the result of a financial crisis. Recoveries after financial crises are normally weak and slow as banking systems are repaired and balance-sheets rebuilt. Typically, this period of debt reduction lasts around seven years, which means America would emerge from it in 2014. By some measures, households are reducing their debt burdens unusually fast, but even optimistic seers do not think the process is much more than half over.Battling on the busAmerica’s biggest problem is that its politicians have yet to acknowledge that the economy is in for such a long, slow haul, let alone prepare for the consequences. A few brave officials are beginning to sound warnings that the jobless rate is likely to “stay high”. But the political debate is more about assigning blame for the recession than about suggesting imaginative ways to give more oomph to the recovery.Republicans argue that Barack Obama’s shift towards “big government” explains the economy’s weakness, and that high unemployment is proof that fiscal stimulus was a bad idea. In fact, most of the growth in government to date has been temporary and unavoidable; the longer-run growth in government is more modest, and reflects the policies of both Mr Obama andhis predecessor. And the notion that high joblessness “proves” that stimulus failed is simply wron g. The mechanics of a financial bust suggest that without a fiscal boost the recession would have been much worse.Democrats have their own class-warfare version of the blame game, in which Wall Street’s excesses caused the problem and higher taxes on high-earners are part of the solution. That is why Mr. Obama’s legislative priority before the mid-terms is to ensure that the Bush tax cuts expire at the end of this year for households earning more than $250,000 but are extended for everyone else.This takes an unnecessary risk with the short-term recovery. America’s experience in 1937 and Japan’s in 1997 are powerful evidence that ill-timed tax rises can tip weak economies back into recession. Higher taxes at the top, along with the waning of fiscal stimulus and belt-tightening by the states, will make a weak growth rate weaker still. Less noticed is that Mr. Obama’s fiscal plan will also worsen the medium-term budget mess, by making tax cuts for the middle class permanent.Ways to overhaul the engineIn an ideal world America would commit itself now to the medium-term tax reforms and spending cuts needed to get a grip on the budget, while leaving room to keep fiscal policy loose for the moment. But in febrile, partisan Washington that is a pipe-dream. Today’s goals can only be more modest: to nurture the weak economy, minimize uncertainty and prepare the ground for tomorrow’s fiscal debate. To that end, Congress ought to extend all the Bush tax cuts until 2013. Then they should all expire—prompting a serious fiscal overhaul, at a time when the economy is stronger.A broader set of policies could help to work off the hangover faster. One priority is to encourage more write-downs of mortgage debt. Almost a quarter of all Americans with mortgages owe more than their houses are worth. Until that changes the vicious cycle of rising foreclosures and falling prices will continue. There are plenty of ideas on offer, from changing the bankruptcy law so that judges can restructure mortgage debt to empowering special trustees to write down loans. They all have drawbacks, but a fetid pool of underwater mortgages will, much like Japan’s loans to zombie firms, corrode the financial system and harm the recovery.Cleaning up the housing market would help cut America’s unemploy ment rate, by making it easier for people to move to where jobs are. But more must be done to stop high joblessness becoming entrenched. Payroll-tax cuts and credits to reduce the cost of hiring would help. (The health-care reform, alas, does the opposite, at least for small businesses.) Politicians will also have to think harder about training schemes, because some workers lack the skills that new jobs require.Americans are used to great distances. The sooner they, and their politicians, accept that the road to recovery will be a long one, the faster they will get there.。
第22届"韩素音青年翻译奖"竞赛译文2：如何翻译“atomized culture”高斋翻译TransElegant整理的CATTI和MTI备考资料英译汉Hidden WithinTechnology’s Empire, a Republic of Letters隐藏于技术帝国的文学界From the first, too, I had been warned that the novel was at the point of death, that like the walled city or the crossbow, it was a thing of the past. And no one likes to be at odds with history. Oswald Spengler, one of the most widely read authors of the early 30’s, taught that our tired old civilization was very nearly finished. His advice to the young was to avoid literature and the arts and to embrace mechanization and become engineers.一开始也有人告诫我，小说正濒临死亡，犹如城郭或弓弩，已属昨日之物。
谁也不愿和历史作对。
奥斯瓦尔德·斯宾格勒（8）——30年代初拥有最广泛读者的作者之一——曾教导我们，陈腐、古老的文明已几近末路，建议年轻人避开文学和艺术，拥抱机械化，去当工程师。
In refusing to be obsolete, you challenged and defied the evolutionist historians. I had great respect for Spengler in my youth, but even then I couldn’t accept his conclusions, and (with respect and admiration) I mentally told him to get lost.你拒绝被淘汰，就是对进化论史学家的挑战和蔑视。
英译汉竞赛原文：The Concept of Intelligence in Cross-cultural Perspectives[1] One of the positive outcomes from so much research on the relationship between culture and intelligence is an expanded view of what intelligence may be, and how it may be conceptually related to culture. This issue is intricately intertwined with cross-cultural research on intelligence because one of the possible confounding factors in previous studies that documented cultural differences has been cultural differences in the very concept and meaning of intelligence.[2] Researchers in this area have discovered that many languages have no word that corresponds to our idea of intelligence. The closest Mandarin equivalent, for instance, is a Chinese character that means “good brain and talented”. Chinese people often associate this concept with traits such as imitation, effort, and social responsibility. Such traits do not constitute important elements of the concept of intelligence for most Americans.[3] African cultures provide a number of examples. The Baganda of East Africa use the word obugezi to refer to a combination of mental and social skills that make a person steady, cautious, and friendly. The Djerma-Songhai in West Africa use the term akkal, which has an even broader meaning – a combination of intelligence, know-how, and social skills. Still another society, the Baoule, uses the term n’glouele, which describes children who are not only mentally alert but also willing to volunteer their services without being asked.[4] Because of the enormous differences in the ways cultures define intelligence, it is difficult to make valid comparisons from one society to another. That is, different cultures value different traits (their definition of “intelligence”) and have divergent views concerning which traits are useful in predicting future important behaviors (also culturally defined). People in different cultures not only disagree about what constitutes intelligence but also about the proper way to demonstrate those abilities. In mainstream North American society, individuals are typically rewarded for displaying knowledge and skills. This same behavior may be considered improper, arrogant, or rude in societies that stress personal relationships, cooperation, and modesty.[5] These differences are important to cross-cultural studies of intelligence because successful performance on a task of intelligence may require behavior that is considered immodest and arrogant in Culture A (and therefore only reluctantly displayed by members of Culture A)but desirable in Culture B (and therefore readily displayed by members of Culture B). Clearly, such different attitudes toward the same behavior could lead researchers to draw inaccurate conclusions about differences in intelligence between Culture A and Culture B.[6] Another reason it is difficult to compare intelligence cross-culturally is that tests of intelligence often rely on knowledge that is specific to a particular culture; investigators based in that culture may not even know what to test for in a different culture. For example, one U.S. intelligence test contains the following question: “How does a violin resemble a piano?” Clearly, this question assumes prior knowledge about violins and pianos –quite a reasonable expectation for middle-class Americans, but not for people from cultures that use different musical instruments.[7] Our expanding knowledge about cultural differences in the concept of intelligence has had important ramifications for our theoretical understanding of intelligence in mainstream American psychology as well. Although traditional thinking and reasoning abilities have dominated views of intelligence in the past, in recent years psychologists have begun to turn their attention to other possible aspects of intelligence. Until very recently, for example, creativity was not considered a part of intelligence; now, however, psychologists are increasingly considering this important human ability as a type of intelligence. Other aspects of intelligence are also coming to the forefront. A psychologist has suggested that there are really seven different types of intelligence: logical mathematical, linguistic, musical, spatial, bodily kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal. According to this scheme, not only do the core components of each of these seven types of intelligence differ, but so do some sample end-states (such as mathematician versus dancer). His theory ofmultiple intelligences has broadened our understanding of intelligence to include other areas besides “book smarts”.[8] Perhap s the field is coming to realize that intelligence in its broadest sense may be more aptly defined as “the skills and abilities necessary to effectively accomplish cultural goals”. If your culture’s goals, for example, involve successfully pursuing a professional occupation with a good salary in order to support yourself and your family, that culture will foster a view of intelligence that incorporates cognitive and emotional skills and abilities that allow for pursuing such an occupation. Those skills and abilities may include deductive reasoning, logical thought, verbal and mathematical skills –the sorts of skills that are fostered in contemporary American culture. If your culture’s goals, however, focus more on the development and maintenance of successful interpersonal relationships, working with nature, or hunting and gathering, intelligence will more aptly be viewed as the skills and abilities related to such activities.[9] On one level, therefore, people of all cultures share a similar view of intelligence –a catchall concept that summarizes the skills and abilities necessary to live effectively in one’s culture. At the same time, however, cultural differences naturally exist because of differences in how cultures define goals and skills and abilities needed to achieve those goals. Future research will need to delve into these dual processes, searching for commonalities as well as differences across cultures and exploring what contextual variables affect intelligence-related behaviors, and why.[10] Awareness of cultural differences in intelligence raises difficult questions concerning testing and the use of test scores. Should bias in testing be eliminated at the expense of the predictive validity of the test? Many educational institutions and business organizations today face this difficult question, which is compounded by legal ramifications and the constant threat of litigation. Perhaps we need to give consideration to yet another aspect of intelligence – that is, our attitudes regarding intelligence. A cross-cultural understanding of differences in the definitions and processes of intelligence should help to deepen our appreciation and respect for cultures different from our own, and help us to find similarities as well as differences among people.。
