考研英语翻译讲座第1讲

第1课知识的悖论The Paradox of Knowledge人类从古类人猿进化到当前的状态这个长久的进化过程中的最大成就是有关于人类自身、世界以及宇宙众多知识的获得和积聚。

这些知识的产物就是那些我们总称为“文化”的所有的东西，包括语言、科学、文学、艺术、所有的物质机器、仪器、我们所用的结构以及社会所依赖的物质基础设施。

我们之中大多数人认为现代社会中各种知识在不断增长，与此同时社会或群体对新知识的积累也在稳步减少我们对人类自身、世界及宇宙的未知。

然而，现有的无垠的未知领域在不断提示着我们需要批判性地分析这个设想。

普遍的观点认为，智力的演变与身体的发育相似，虽然要快上许多。

生物的进化经常被描述为“个体的进化重演物种的进化”，意思就是个体的胚胎在其从受精卵发展到人类胎儿的过程中经历了几个阶段，在这些阶段中个体胚胎类似人类物种的祖先形式。

普遍的观点认为人类从天真无邪的状态进步的，这个状态可以比作婴儿，然后逐渐的获得越来越多的知识，就像一个小孩通过学习通过了教育体系的几个年级一样。

这种观点中暗含着一种臆断，那就是种系发育类似个体发育，知识的积累最终能达到一个基本完整的阶段，至少在特定的领域中是如此，就好像社会已获得了所有的高等学位，这些学位表明它已经掌握了各个重要学科的知识。

实际上，一些杰出的科学家已经表达了这样的观点。

1894年伟大的物理学家Albert Michelson在芝加哥大学的一个演讲中讲到：虽然不能断言未来的物理学不会再取得比过去更惊人的成就，但很可能大多数的重要的基本原理都已经牢固的确立了，那么，进一步的发展将可能主要是如何将这些基本原理精确地应用到我们注意的现象上去。

人们很难在物理学领域再作突破。

在迈克尔逊讲述上一段话之后的一个世纪，科学家们在物理学上的发现远远超出了对小数点第六位测量的改进，而今天没有人会再进行与Michelson相似的阐述。

但是仍有许多人坚持认为知识有迟早达到穷尽的可能性。

一、考研翻译高分策略【本章要点】-掌握考研翻译高分两大策略-巩固试题演练【翻译技巧】◎尽量译主干1）划竖线，断开结构2）看动词，瞻前顾后3）译主干，稳定分数◎修饰层层加1）看词性，分析关系2）译修饰，能加则加【试题演练】【例1】（2005年49题）Creating a“European identity”that respects the different cultures and traditions which go to make up the connecting fabric of the Old Continent is no easy task and demands a strategic choice.模考：笔记：【例2】（2008年47题）He asserted,also,that his power to follow a long and purely abstract train of thought was very limited,for which reason he felt certain that he never could have succeeded with mathematics.模考：笔记：【例3】（2008年49题）He adds humbly that perhaps he was“superior to the common run of men in noticing things which easily escape attention,and in observing them carefully.”模考：笔记：本章参考译文【例1】不同的文化和传统把欧洲大陆编织在一起，要创造出一种尊重这些不同文化和传统的“欧洲品牌”绝非易事，需要人们做出战略性的选择。

【例2】他还坚持认为自己进行长时间完全抽象思维的能力十分有限，由此他认定自己在数学方面根本不可能有大的作为。

2001年考研英语翻译真题精练精讲一、全真试卷In less than30years time the Star Trek holodeck will be a reality. Direct links between the brains nervous system and a computer will also create full sensory virtual environments，allowing virtual vacations like those in the film Total Recall.（71）There will be television chat shows hosted by robots，and cars with pollution monitors that will disable them when they offend.（72）Children will play with dolls equipped with personality chips，computers with in-built personalities will be regarded as workmates rather than tools，relaxation will be in front of smell-television，and digital age will have arrived.According to BT s futurologist，Ian Pearson，these are among the developments scheduled for the first few decades of the new millennium（a period of 1000years），when supercomputers will dramatically accelerate progress in all areas of life.（73）Pearson has pieced together the work of hundreds of researchers around the world to produce a unique millennium technology calendar that gives the latest dates when we can expect hundreds or key breakthroughs and discoveries to take place. Some of the biggest developments will be in medicine，including an extended life expectancy and dozens of artificial organs coming into use between now and 2040.Pearson also predicts a breakthrough in computer-human links. “By linking directly to our nervous system，computers could pick up what we feel and，hopefully，simulate feeling too so that we can start to develop full sensory environments，rather like the holidays in Total Recall or the Star Trek holodeck,”, he says.（74）But that，Pearson points out，is only the start of man-machine integration:”It will be the beginning of the long process of integration that will ultimately lead to a fully electronic human befo re the end of the next century.”Through his research，Pearson is able to put dates to most of the breakthroughs that can be predicted. However，there are still no forecasts for when faster-that-light travel will be available，or when human cloning will be perfected，or when time travel will be possible. But he does expect social problems as a result of technological advances. A boom in neighborhood surveillance cameras will，for example，cause problems in2010，while the arrival of synthetic lifelike robots will mean people may not be able to distinguish between their human friends and the droids.（75）And home appliances will also become so smart that controlling and operating them will result in the breakout of a new psychological disorder—kitchen rage.二、翻译题解（71）Therewill betelevision chat shows hosted by robots, and cars with pollution monitorsthatwill disablethem when they offend.句子拆分：拆分点参考：分词,标点符号，连词There will be television chat shows// hosted by robots//, and cars with pollution monitors// that will disable them// when they offend.解读：1）主干结构是带双主语的存在句：There will be television chat shows..., and cars...2）两个主语都带有定语：第一个主语television chat shows的定语是过去分词短语hosted by robots，第二个主语cars的定语是介词短语with pollution monitors。

You need to help them indentify you as a prospective “key player〞.你需要帮助他们认定你有潜力成为一名核心员工。

Trait 1: The selfless collaborator特征1：无私的合作者John Fetzer, career consultant and chemist, first suggested this trait,职业参谋和化学家约翰·费策尔最早提出了这个特征。

which has already been written about a great deal.It deserves repeating because it is the single most public difference between academia and industry.它之所以值得被反复谈及，是因为这一特征是学术界和企业间最明显的差异。

“It's teamwork,〞says Fetzer.“这里需要合作，〞费策尔说，“The business environment is less lone-wolf and competitive.“企业的环境并不需要单打独斗，争强好胜，so signs of being collaborative and selfless stand out.所以表现出合作和无私精神的员工就脱颖而出了。

You just can't succeed in an industry environment without this mindset.〞在企业环境中，没有这样的思维方式就不可能成功。

〞Many postdocs and grad students have a tough time showing that they can make this transition许多博士后和研究生在进行这种过渡的过程中表现得相当费力。

Spillonomics: Underestimating Risk漏油经济:低估风险David LeonhardtPublished： June 1, 2010[1］ In retrospect， the pattern seems clear。

Years before the Deepwater Horizon ［həˈraɪzn］ rig[rɪɡ］blew, BP was developing a reputation as an oil company that took safety risks to save money。

An explosion at a Texas [ˈtɛksəs］refinery [rɪˈfaɪnəri] killed 15 workers in 2005, and federal regulators and a panel led by James A。

Baker III, the former secretary of state， said that cost cutting was partly to blame. The next year， a corroded ［kəˈrəʊd] pipeline in Alaska poured oil into Prudhoe Bay，upbraided［ʌpˈbreɪd] BP managers for their “seeming indifference to safety and environmental issues. [’ɪʃju：z］"[1] 回想起来，模式似乎很清楚。

早在“深水地平线”钻机自爆前的很多年，BP石油公司为了省钱甘冒安全的风险就已经声名狼藉。

2005年得克萨斯州炼油厂爆炸中有15名工人丧生。

联邦监管机构和前国务卿詹姆斯·贝克三世领导的专门小组认为，削减成本是事故的部分原因。

Lesson 1 GlobalizationText A Living Between Three Worlds Globalization, for better or for worse, has changed the world greatly. Though still in its early stage, it is all but unstoppable. The challenge that people face nowadays is learning how to live with it, manage it and take advantage of the benefits it offers.Many people believe that, because of globalization, productivity throughout the world will be boosted and, as the world becomes richer and more prosperous, living standards everywhere have the potential to rise. However, there are still a lot of naysayers who take the opposite view, claiming that globalization will have increasingly devastating effects on our lives. Both sides can point to ample examples to support their cases. But in the end, both are probably exaggerating to some extent. What is irrefutable is that the world economic pie is indeed becoming bigger because of globalization – and it is being sliced differently than before.As a matter of fact, globalization means different things to different people, especially when it comes to touchy issues like jobs outsourcing or immigration. Globalization may create more jobs than it actually destroys, but they are in different sectors and in different geographic regions. In today’s world, it takes more skills, education and mobility to be employable.In the following, Sujan Pandit, an Indian writing from Calcutta, describes how he is caught between several tectonic shifts in the global labor market. He also explores how his unique situation gives him choices afforded to few other Indians.My fate is not that of a corporate foot-soldier, which – as the television images and newspaper photographs would suggest – involves a life of labor in a little cell and in tandem with many other, equally industrious honey-bees, armed only with a workstation and telephone.My job in marketing and business development does not eschew face-to-face contact. The company I work for is a small one, but it is spaced over three time zones: in Dallas, New York and Calcutta.But what makes the company distinctive is that it is a post-modern firm, since such a firm could scarcely have existed ten years ago. It is what Manuel Castells – Professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley – would have called a network company, held together through e-mails and teleconferences alone.Stepping out of the air-conditioned office, I am greeted with the hot, damp touch of a Calcutta dusk. I hailed a black and yellow boneshaker of a taxi and instruct the driver to head for my club.His is an old Ambassador car, a poor Morris Oxford imitation dating back to the 1950s and still unchanged – a veritable monument of the pre-globalization License Raj era.As the taxi makes its way through the hustle and bustle of Calcutta’s streets, the blaring music and garish film posters, dodging cows and errant rickshaw pullers, I meditate on the scene around me.What a contrast between the work I do and the lives they lead! What does globalization mean to these people? If globalization has to mean anything significant to the Indian poor, it must mean a transformation of their lives.And yet, I can bet 100 to one that their lives will differ in no significant way from their fathers’ or grandfathers’ before them. The only consolation I can offer myself is that my job makes me the avant-garde of a movement which may – over the course of this century – improve their great-grandchildren’s lives.Finally, the taxi reaches the club and an old Victorian clubhouse comes into view amidst the sprawling golf course, manicured lawns and tennis courts. I head for the tea-lounge.With its Daniels’ water-color prints, richly brocaded chairs, dark mahogany paneling and wooden parquetry, this is the place to enjoy coffee after work. A liveried waiter brings me some.The club itself is a product of that last great age of globalization, what Eric Hobsbawm called “The Age of Empire”. Now that we are in another age of globalization, little of the décor seems to have changed since then.Only then, as an Indian, I would not have been allowed to enter its hallowed portals. Perhaps some thing do change after all!Sipping my coffee, I ponder over the question that is being debated in England: “Import workers or export jobs?” The first thing that strikes me is that it presents a so very First World perspective.Sitting in a Third World country, the proposition could equally be phrased as: “Export workers – or import jobs?” Actually, whichever way you state it, the economist’s answer is the same and is very simple: it does not matter.As a graduate student of economics, I have imbibed the theorems of microeconomics almost with my mother’s milk. If we view the right to work and citizenship as a bundle of legal rights, then their free exchange will move resources to their highest valued use, thereby maximizing global output.Under such conditions, migration and outsourcing are two sides of the same coin, temporary disequilibrium conditions leading to an eventual equilibrium.An admirable goal? Indeed! Realizable? It will founder on the frailties of human nature. Equal real wages for equivalent work throughout the world is the most heart-warming as long as it doesn’t affect my own lifestyle. Equality is good so long that I am immune from its pressures.By a strange quirk of fate, I am condemned to view the problems of migration and outsourcing from both sides.As a child of an Indian father and English mother, I have Indian citizenship, but also a Right of Abode which allows me to work in the United Kingdom. At the same time, I am an applicant for a U.S. Green Card.Much of my high education occurred in the United States and I have worked in Indian , the U.K. and the United States. A real citizen of one country, I remain an imaginary citizen of two others.Trapped between three worlds, I feel justifiably proud at India’s success in outsourcing. Yet I am equally aware that as a potential migrant to the U.K. or the United States, the reduction in transaction costs that makes outsourcing possible has an infringing consequence: It also reduces the economic attractiveness of these two countries to me.Once we become members of an exclusive club ( like the one I am sitting in ), we would like all further applications stopped!It is this duality of human nature that makes me view the future of globalization with foreboding. Just as the last great age of globalization engendered uncontrolled jingoism and came crashing down amidst the mud and filth of Flanders’ fields, our age too has its weaknesses.Foremost among them is protectionism, which includes eliminating immigration. Equality of real wages of equivalent work is going to hit some people in the developed world really hard – and for reasons not of their own making.Before Industrial Revolution, poverty was equally distributed throughout the globe, and therefore global inequality was low.Certainly, great differences existed between king and peasant in all feudal societies, but the lot of peasant in India and Europe was fairly similar: a life at the margin.Then came the Industrial Revolution – and a few countries began to pull away from the rest. This secular separation has gone on for over two centuries now.It has reached a point where the average bachelor’ degree holder in India has to make do on a few dollars a day, while his U.S. counterpart with a similar educational level enjoys a three-bedroom house, even if both are doing the same work.The reason why this could go on was because, for the U.S. worker, the labor market he or she had to face was the local, or at best, the national market. The fall in transaction costs owing to globalization has meant that the relevant market for this worker is now the international one.This dramatic outward shift of the labor supply curve will naturally reduce his wages. At the same time, it reduces global inequality in remuneration for similar work. Both migration and outsourcing can be viewed as an attempt to arbitrage these existing wage differentials.This will certainly lead to a backlash, as is happening in the United States and Europe right now. Nor will it go away easily, not even with a return to economic prosperity.This is because of the fundamental contradiction that lies at the heart of the liberal political and economic order. The liberal economic order demands progression towards perfect competition, which ultimately devalues citizenship rights. On the other hand, the liberal political order is predicated by the concert of nation-states.We have, so far, no other bases for the establishment of democratic regimes —and the E.U. is still too immature and unloved to take its place that demands robust citizenship rights.The economic entrepreneur is expected follow the demands and needs of the consumers slavishly, but if the political entrepreneur —that is, the politician —were to follow this advice, a protectionist regime could easily emerge. After all, demand for protection is a natural reaction to declining or stagnant income levels.There is no easy way out of this dilemma and only a good dose of common-sense and self-restraint can alleviate matters.Complex thoughts. Weighty matters. And no resolution. Having finished my coffee, I take my leave from the tea-lounge and wait in the foyer for a taxi.As I scan the darkness outsides, I think of my lawyer back in Dallas and mutter, “When will my Green Card come?”。