2012年5月CATTI二级笔译真题与参考答案

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2012年5月CATTI二级笔译真题与参考答案

《笔译综合能力》
　　1. 阅读第一篇选自《纽约时报》，原文标题为：FewBiologists but Many Evangelicals Sign Anti-Evolution Petition
　　节选部分内容如下：
　　In the recent skirmishes over evolution, advocateswho have pushed to dilute its teaching have regularly pointed to a petitionsigned by 514 scientists and engineers.
　　The petition, they say, is proof that scientificdoubt over evolution persists. But random interviews with 20 people who signedthe petition and a review of the public statements of more than a dozen otherssuggest that many are evangelical Christians, whose doubts about evolution grewout of their religious beliefs. And even the petition''s sponsor, the DiscoveryInstitute in Seattle, says that only a quarter of the signers are biologists,whose field is most directly concerned with evolution. The other signersinclude 76 chemists, 75 engineers, 63 physicists and 24 professors of medicine.
　　The petition was started in 2001 by the institute,which champions intelligent design as an alternative theory to evolution andsupports a "teach the controversy" approach, like the one scuttled bythe state Board of Education in Ohio last week.
　　Institute officials said that 41 people added theirnames to the petition after a federal judge ruled in December against theDover, Pa., school district''s attempt to present intelligent design as analternative to evolution.
　　"Early on, the critics said there was nobody whodisbelieved Darwin''s theory except for rubes in the woods," said BruceChapman, president of the institute. "How many does it take to be anoticeable minority — 10, 50, 100, 500?"
　　Mr. Chapman said the petition showed "there is aminority of scientists who disagree with Darwin''s theory, and it is not just ahandful."
　　The petition makes no mention of intelligent design,the proposition that life is so complex that it is best explained as the designof an intelligent being. Rather, it states: "We are skeptical of claimsfor the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for thecomplexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theoryshould be encouraged."
　　A Web site with the full list of those who signed thepetition was made available yesterday by the institute atdissentfromdarwin.org. The signers all claim doctorates in science orengineering. The list includes a few nationally prominent scientists like JamesM. Tour, a professor of chemistry at Rice University; Rosalind W. Picard,director of the affective computing research group at the MassachusettsInstitute of Technology; and Philip S. Skell, an emeritus professor ofchemistry at Penn State who is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
　　It also includes many with more modest positions,like Thomas H. Marshall, director of public works in Delaware, Ohio, who has adoctorate in environmental ecology. The Discovery Institute says 128 signershold degrees in the biological sciences and 26 in biochemistry. That leavesmore than 350 nonbiologists, including Dr. Tour, Dr. Picard and Dr. Skell.
　　Of the 128 biologists who signed, few conductresearch that would directly address the question of what shaped the history oflife.
　　Of the signers who are evangelical Christians, mostdefend their doubts on scientific grounds but also say that evolution runs againsttheir religious beliefs.
　　Several said that their doubts began when theyincreased their involvement with Christian churches.
　　Some said they read the Bible literally and doubt notonly evolution but also findings of geology and cosmology that show theuniverse and the earth to be billions of years old.
　　Scott R. Fulton, a professor of mathematics andcomputer science at Clarkson University in Potsdam, N.Y., who signed thepetition, said that the argument for intelligent design was "veryinteresting and promising."
　　He said he thought his religious belief was "notparticularly relevant" in how he judged intelligent design. "Itprobably influences in the sense in that it makes me very interested in thequestions," he said. "When I see scientific evidence that points toGod, I find that encouraging."
　　Roger J. Lien, a professor of poultry science atAuburn, said he received a copy of the petition from Christian friends.
　　"I stuck my name on it," he said."Basically, it states what I believe."
　　Dr. Lien said that he grew up in California in afamily that was not deeply religious and that he accepted evolution throughmuch of his scientific career. He said he became a Christian about a decadeago, six years after he joined the Auburn faculty.
　　"The world is broken, and we humans and ourscience can''t fix it," Dr. Lien said. "I was brought to Jesus Christand God and creationism and believing in the Bible."
　　He also said he thought that evolution was"inconsistent with what the Bible says."
　　Another signer is Dr. Gregory J. Brewer, a professorof cell biology at the Southern Illinois University medical school. Like otherskeptics, he readily accepts what he calls "microevolution," theability of species to adapt to changing conditions in their environment. But heholds to the opinion that science has not convincingly shown that one speciescan evolve into another.
　　"I think there''s a lot of problems withevolutionary dogma," said Dr. Brewer, who also does not accept thescientific consensus that the universe is billions of years old."Scientifically, I think there are other possibilities, one of which wouldbe intelligent design. Based on faith, I do believe in the creationaccount."
　　Dr. Tour, who developed the "nano-car" — asingle molecule in the shape of a car, with four rolling wheels — said heremained open-minded about evolution.
　　"I respect that work," said Dr. Tour, whodescribes himself as a Messianic Jew, one who also believes in Christ as theMessiah.
　　But he said his experience in chemistry andnanotechnology had showed him how hard it was to maneuver atoms and molecules.He found it hard to believe, he said, that nature was able to produce themachinery of cells through random processes. The explanations offered byevolution, he said, are incomplete.
　　"I can''t make the jumps, the leaps they make inthe explanations," Dr. Tour said. "Will I or other scientists likelybe able to makes those jumps in the future? Maybe."
　　Opposing petitions have sprung up. The NationalCenter for Science Education, which has battled efforts to dilute the teachingof evolution, has sponsored a pro-evolution petition signed by 700 scientistsnamed Steve, in honor of Stephen Jay Gould, the Harvard paleontologist who diedin 2002.
　　The petition affirms that evolution is "a vital,well-supported, unifying principle of the biological sciences."
　　Mr. Chapman of that institute said the opposingpetitions were beside the point. "We never claimed we''re in a fight fornumbers," he said.
　　Discovery officials said that they did not ask thereligious beliefs of the signers and that such beliefs were not relevant. JohnG. West, a senior fellow at Discovery, said it was "stunninghypocrisy" to ask signers about their religion "while treating thereligious beliefs of the proponents of Darwin as irrelevant."
　　2. 阅读第三篇选自《纽约时报》，原文标题为：RichardPrince Lawsuit Focuses on Limits of Appropriation
　　节选部分内容如下：
　　In March a federal district court judge in Manhattanruled that Mr. Prince — whose career was built on appropriating imagery createdby others — broke the law by taking photographs from a book about Rastafariansand using them without permission to create the collages and a series ofpaintings based on them, which quickly sold for serious money even by today’sgilded art-world standards: almost $2.5 million for one of the works. (“Wow —yeah,” Mr. Prince said when a lawyer asked him under oath in the district courtcase if that figure was correct.)
　　The decision, by Judge Deborah A. Batts, set offalarm bells throughout Chelsea and in museums across America that showcontemporary art. At the heart of the case, which Mr. Prince is now appealing,is the principle called fair use, a kind of door in the bulwark of copyrightprotections. It gives artists (or anyone for that matter) the ability to usesomeone else’s material for certain purposes, especially if the resulttransforms the thing used — or as Judge Pierre N. Leval described it in aninfluential 1990 law review article, if the new thing “adds value to theoriginal” so that society as a whole is culturally enriched by it. In the mostfamous test of the principle, the Supreme Court in 1994 found a possibility offair use by the group 2 Live Crew in its sampling of parts of Roy Orbison’s “OhPretty Woman” for the sake of one form of added value, parody.
　　In the Prince case the notoriously slippery standardfor transformation was defined so narrowly that artists and museums warned itwould leave the fair-use door barely open, threatening the robust tradition ofappropriation that goes back at least to Picasso and underpins much of the artof the last half-century. Several museums, including the Museum of Modern Artand the Metropolitan, rallied to the cause, filing papers supporting Mr. Princeand calling the decision a blow to “the strong public interest in the free flowof creative expression.” Scholars and lawyers on the other side of the debatehailed it instead as a welcome corrective in an art world too long in thrall tothe Pictures Generation — artists like Mr. Prince who used appropriationbeginning in the 1970s to burrow beneath the surface of media culture.
　　But if the case has had any effect so far, it hasbeen to drag into the public arena a fundamental truth hovering somewhere justoutside the legal debate: that today’s flow of creative expression, riding atide of billions of instantly accessible digital images and clips, is rapidlybecoming so free and recycling so reflexive that it is hard to imagine it beingslowed, much less stanched, whatever happens in court. It is a phenomenon thatmakes Mr. Prince’s artful thefts — those collages in the law firm’s office —look almost Victorian by comparison, and makes the copyright battle and itsattendant fears feel as if they are playing out in another era as well, perhapsnot Victorian but certainly pre-Internet.
　　In many ways the art world is a latecomer to thekinds of copyright tensions that have already played out in fields like musicand movies, where extensive systems of policing, permission and licensing haveevolved. But art lawyers say that legal challenges are now coming at a fasterpace, perhaps in part because the art market has become a much bigger businessand because of the extent of the borrowing ethos.
　　1. 英译汉第一篇选自《纽约时报》，原文标题为：Translationas Literary Ambassador
　　节选部分内容如下：
　　The runaway success of Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium”trilogy suggests that when it comes to contemporary literature in translation,Americans are at least willing to read Scandinavian detective fiction. But forwork from other regions, in other genres, winning the interest of bigpublishing houses and readers in the United States remains a steep uphillstruggle.
　　Among foreign cultural institutes and publishers, thetraditional American aversion to literature in translation is known as “the 3percent problem.” But now, hoping to increase their minuscule share of theAmerican book market — about 3 percent — foreign governments and foundations,especially those on the margins of Europe, are taking matters into their ownhands and plunging into the publishing fray in the United States.
　　Increasingly, that campaign is no longer limited towidely spoken languages like French and German. From Romania to Catalonia toIceland, cultural institutes and agencies are subsidizing publication of booksin English, underwriting the training of translators, encouraging their writersto tour in the United States, submitting to American marketing and promotionaltechniques they may have previously shunned and exploiting existing niches inthe publishing industry.
　　“We have established this as a strategic objective, along-term commitment to break through the American market,” said Corina Suteu,who leads the New York branch of the European Union National Institutes forCulture and directs the Romanian Cultural Institute. “For nations in Europe, bethey small or large, literature will always be one of the keys of theircultural existence, and we recognize that this is the only way we are going tobe able to make that literature present in the United States.”
　　For instance, the Dalkey Archive Press, a smallpublishing house in Champaign, Ill., that for more than 25 years hasspecialized in translated works, this year began a Slovenian Literature Series,underwritten by official groups in Slovenia, once part of Yugoslavia. Theseries’s first book, “Necropolis,” by Boris Pahor, is a powerful World War IIconcentration-camp memoir that has been compared to the best of Elie Wiesel andPrimo Levi, and has been followed by Andrej Blatnik’s “You Do Understand,” arather absurdist but still touching collection of sketches and parables aboutlove and intimacy.
　　Dalkey has also begun or is about to begin similarseries in Hebrew and Catalan, and with Switzerland and Mexico, the last ofwhich will consist of four books yearly for six years. In each case a financingagency in the host country is subsidizing publication and participating inpromotion and marketing in the United States, an effort that can easily require$10,000 or more a book.
　　2. 英译汉的第二篇节选自《纽约时报》，原文标题为：ArgentinaHopes for a Big Payoff in Its Shale Oil Field Discovery
　　节选部分内容为：
　　Just east of Argentina’s Andean foothills, an oilfield called the Vaca Muerta — “dead cow” in English — has finally come tolife.
　　In May, the Argentine oil company YPF announced thatit had found 150 million barrels of oil in the Patagonian field, and PresidentCristina Fernández de Kirchner rushed onto national television to praise thediscovery as something that could give new impetus to the country’slong-stagnant economy.
　　“The importance of this discovery goes well beyondthe volume,” said Sebastián Eskenazi, YPF’s chief executive, as he announcedthe find. “The important thing is it is something new: new energy, a newfuture, new expectations.”
　　Although there are significant hurdles, geologistssay that the Vaca Muerta is a harbinger of a possible major expansion of globalpetroleum supplies over the next two decades as the industry uses advancedtechniques to extract oil from shale and other tightly packed rocks.
　　Oil experts caution that geologists have only justbegun to study shale fields in much of the world, and thus can only guess attheir potential. Little seismic work has been completed, and core samples needto be retrieved from thousands of feet below the surface to judge how much oilor gas can be retrieved.
　　Argentina certainly has high hopes for shale oil fromthe southern Patagonian province of Neuquén. The 150 million barrels ofrecoverable shale oil found in the Vaca Muerta represents an increase of 8percent in Argentina’s reserves, and the find was the biggest discovery of oilin the country since the late 1980s.
　　Oil experts say the Vaca Muerta is probably just astart for Argentina, long a middle-ranked oil producer. Mr. Lynch noted thatYPF had explored only 100 square miles out of 5,000 square miles in the wholeshale deposit, and other oil companies working in the area had not announcedany discoveries yet.
　　So far, nearly all of the oil exploration in theshale fields in Argentina and elsewhere has been pursued with traditionalvertical wells. Plans are just beginning for horizontal drilling.
　　Some experts caution that the fast advance of oilproduction from shale in the United States is no guarantee of similar successesabroad, at least not in the near future.
　　2. 汉译英的第一篇节选自《胡锦涛在金砖国家领导人第三次会晤时的讲话》（2011年4月15日）
　　原文：
　　和平稳定是发展的前提和基础。上个世纪，人类经历了两次世界大战，生灵涂炭，经济社会发展遭受严重挫折。第二次世界大战结束以来，世界经济能够快速增长，主要得益于相对和平稳定的国际环境。
　　我们应该恪守联合国宪章宗旨和原则，充分发挥联合国及其安理会在维护和平、缔造和平、建设和平方面的核心作用。坚持通过对话和协商，以和平方式解决国际争端。
　　我们应该坚持国家不论大小、强弱、贫富都是国际社会平等一员，以民主、包容、合作、共赢的精神实现共同安全，做到一国内部的事情一国自主办、大家共同的事情大家商量办，坚定不移奉行多边主义和国际合作，推进国际关系民主化。
　　我们应该营造支持各国根据本国国情实现和平、稳定、繁荣的国际环境。应该本着求同存异的原则，尊重各国主权和选择发展道路和发展模式的权利，尊重文明多样性，在交流互鉴、取长补短中相得益彰、共同进步。
　　参考译文：
　　Peace and stability form the prerequisite andfoundation for development. The two world wars in the last century causedmankind untold sufferings and world economic and social development severesetbacks. It is mainly due to the relatively peaceful and stable internationalenvironment that the world economy has been able to grow at a fast pace in thepost-war era. The World Bank statistics show that none of the countriespersistently under violent conflict has achieved the UN Millennium DevelopmentGoals (MDGs). To maintain world peace and stability so that the people can livea happy and prosperous life is the primary responsibility for governments andleaders of all countries.
　　We should abide by the purposes and principles of theUN Charter and bring into full play the central role of the United Nations andits Security Council in peace keeping, peace making and peace building. Weshould seek peaceful settlement of international disputes through dialogue andconsultation.
　　All countries, big or small, strong or weak, rich orpoor, are equal members of the international community. We should work for commonsecurity in a spirit of democracy, inclusiveness, cooperation and win-winprogress. Internal affairs of a country should be handled independently by thecountry itself and international affairs should be managed collectively throughconsultation by all. We should be committed to multilateralism andinternational cooperation, and promote democracy in international relations.
　　We should foster an international environment thatsupports efforts of countries to achieve peace, stability and prosperity in thelight of their national circumstances. We should respect the sovereignty of allcountries and their right to choose their development paths and models inkeeping with the principle of seeking common ground while shelving differences.And we should respect the diversity of civilizations and pursue common progressthrough mutual learning and drawing on each other''s strength.
　　汉译英的第二篇
　　北京周报 2011年第47期 11月24日出版
　　1882年中国第一盏电灯在上海点亮，这使得中国逐渐告别了油灯和蜡烛照明的历史，当时使用的电灯就是白炽灯，这一用就是130年，中国也成为白炽灯的生产和消费大国
　　早在1996年，中国就启动实施了“绿色照明工程”，中国绿色照明工程的实施，推动了照明电器行业结构的优化升级和产品质量的整体提升，经过多年努力，中国节能灯产品质量水平日益提高，一些企业产品质量和工艺水平已达到世界领先水平。高效照明产品及技术的日益成熟为逐步淘汰白炽灯提供了重要保障。
　　中国节能灯的全球市场占有率由1996年的20%提高到2010年的85%。