2003年11月翻译资格考试英语初级笔译实务真题及答案
试题部分：
Part 1: English-Chinese Translation (英译汉) (70 points)
Translate the following passage into Chinese. The time for this section is 120 minutes.
Passage 1
If you have never seen a power plant, you might find it hard to imagine how enormously complex the equipment is or how much heat is generated by the boilers or how much coal it takes to fuel the furnaces for just one day.
During the course of a day, the boilers at one of our power plants, Morgantown, for example, can turn 24 million gallons of water into steam. That generating plant alone uses 9,900 tons of coal in its furnaces in just one day. Potomac Electric Power Company (PEPCO) uses so much coal that we have purchased two 80-car unit trains to facilitate the delivery process. And Morgantown alone can produce over 25 million kilowatt-hours of electricity in a single day’s operation.
Electricity is produced by spinning large magnets inside a coil of wire within the generator. The faster we spin the magnets, the higher will be the voltage of the electricity produced. Electricity leaves a PEPCO generator at between 13,800 and 24,000 volts.
The next step in the process occurs when electricity passes through a transformer where the voltage is stepped up to continue on its journey. A transmission wire is like a small diameter pipe. Stepping up the voltage is like increasing water pressure, thus speeding the flow of energy through the system.
Passage 2
Because the aircraft industry needs ever-increasing quantities of aluminum plate, new equipment has been designed to automate the making of it. It includes a huge heat-treatment furnace, a crane that lifts hot metal plates without damaging them, and a computer system that can manage the complete flow of work.
Five years ago, Europe’s aircraft industry needed only 8,000 tons of aluminum plate a year for its products. Last year the figure reached 21,800 tons. By 2004 it should total 30,000tonnes. Each airliner contains 180 tons of it. That is why the plant is being rebuilt to increase both the quality and the amount of its product.
Aluminum is alloyed with other metals’ and cast into ingots, and the surface of the ingots is smoothed off. After pre-heating, it is rolled in a mill that can take 3.57-m-wide slabs. The new equipment can make the process more efficient and can produce a better product. For example, computers control the temperature of the hot plates, the rate at which they pass through the mill, the speed of cooling it with water, and so on.
The new plant can handle twice the throughput of the one that it is replacing, thanks to the completely automated and computerized process.
Part 2: Chinese-English Translation (汉译英) (30 points)
Translate the following passage into English. The time for this section is 60 minutes.
论想象力的培养
我的讲话是主张培养想象力。
那么，我是从什么意义上使用“想象力”这个词的呢?“想象力”一词的定义是：“构思出理想图画的能力”;“向自己或他人描述不在眼前的事物的能力。”我在下面的讲话使用“想象力”这个词时，就具有这样的含义。
沿着这条思路，我相信可以把我的意思讲清楚。不在眼前的事物是什么呢?例如历史就是。历史讲的是过去的事情。从某种意义上来说，历史并不存在于脑中——就是说，你看不到过去的事情;但是学习历史能使你得到并增强理解不在眼前的事物的能力。因此我愿向你们推荐历史课，那是一门最值得学习的课程。
