2019年CATTI三级笔译实务练习题：经济大萧条
英译汉
Effect of the Great Depression1
It is difficult to measure the human cost2 ofthe Great Depression. The material hardships were bad enough. Men and women lived in lean-tos made of scrap wood and metal, and families went without meat and fresh vegetables for months, existing on a diet of soup and beans. 3 The psychological burden was even greater4: Americans suffered through year after year of grinding poverty with no letup in sight5. The unemployed stood in line for hours waiting for relief checks, veterans sold apples or pencils on street corners, their manhood - once prized so highly by the nation - now in question6. People left the city for the countryside but found no salvation on the farm. Crops rotted in the fields because prices were too low to make harvesting worthwhile7; sheriffs fended off angry crowds as banks foreclosed long overdue mortgages on once prosperous farms8.
Few escaped the suffering. African Americans who had left the poverty of the rural South for factory jobs in the North were among the first to be laid off. Mexican Americans, who had flowed in to replace European immigrants, met with competition from angry citizens, now willing to do stoop labor in the fields and work as track layers on the railroads9. Immigration officials used technicalities10
to halt the flow across the Rio Grande11 and even to reverse it; nearly a half million Mexicans were deported in the 1930s, including families with children born in the United States.
The poor black, brown, and white - survived because they knew better than most Americans how to exist in poverty. They stayed in bed in cold weather, both to keep warm and to avoid unnecessary burning up of calories12; they patched their shoes with pieces of rubber from discarded tires13 , heated only the kitchens of their homes, and ate scraps of food that others would reject.
The middle class, which had always lived with high expectations, was hit hard. Professionals and white-collar workers refused to ask for charity even while their families went without food; one New York dentist and his wife turned on the gas and left a note saying, We want to get out of the way before we are forced to accept relief money. 14 People who fell behind in their mortgage payments lost their homes and then faced eviction when they could not pay the rent.
Health care declined. 15 Middle-class people stopped going to doctors and dentists regularly, unable to make the required cash payment in advance for services rendered. 16 Even the well-to-do were affected, giving up many of their former luxuries and weighed down with guilt as they watched former friends and business
