2011年5月英语二级《笔译实务》试题
Section 1: English-Chinese Translation(英译汉)
Part A Compulsory Translation(必译题)
Farms go out of business for many reasons, but fewfarms do merely because the soil has failed. That isthe miracle of farming. If you care for the soil, it will last — and yield — nearly forever. Americais such a young country that we have barely tested that. For most of our history, there hasbeen new land to farm, and we still farm as though there always will be.
Still, there are some very old farms out there. The oldest is the Tuttle farm, near Dover, N.H.,which is also one of the oldest business enterprises in America. It made the news last weekbecause its owner — a lineal descendant of John Tuttle, the original settler — has decided togo out of business. It was founded in 1632. I hear its sweet corn is legendary.
The year 1632 is unimaginably distant. In 1632, Galileo was still publishing, and John Locke wasborn. There were perhaps 10,000 colonists in all of America, only a few hundred of them in NewHampshire. The Tuttle acres, then, would have seemed almost as surrounded as they do in2010, but by forest instead of highways and houses.
It was a precarious operation at the start — as all farming was in the new colonies—and itbecame precarious enough again in these past few years to peter out at last. The land isprotected by a conservation easement so it can’t be developed, but no one knows whetherthe next owner will farm it.
In a letter on their Web site, the Tuttles cite “exhaustion of resources” as the reason to sell thefarm. The exhausted resources they list include bodies, minds, hearts, imagination, equipment,machinery and finances. They do not mention soil, which has been renewed and redeemedrepeatedly. It’s as though the parishioners of the First Parish Church in nearby Dover —erectednearly 200 years later, in 1829 — had rebuilt the structure on the same spot every few years.
It is too simple to say, as the Tuttles have, that the recession killed a farm that had survived fornearly 400 years. What killed it was the economic structure of food production. Each year it hasbecome harder for family farms to compete with industrial scale agriculture — heavilysubsidized by the government — underselling them at every turn. In a system committed tothe health of farms and their integration with local communities, the result would have beendifferent. In 1632, and for many years after, the Tuttle farm was a necessity. In 2010, it issuddenly superfluous, or so we like to pretend.
Part B Optional Translation(二选一题)
Topic 1 (选题一)
The global youth unemployment rate has reached its highest level on record, and is expectedto increase through 2010, the International Labour Organization (ILO) says in a new report thatwas issued to coincide with the launch of the UN International Youth Year.
The report: ILO Global Employment Trends for Youth 2010 says that of some 620 millioneconomically active youth aged 15 to 24 years, 81 million were unemployed at the end of 2009 --the highest number ever. This is 7.8 million more than the global number in 2007. The youthunemployment rate increased from 11.9 percent in 2007 to 13.0 percent in 2009.
The global youth unemployment rate is expected to continue its increase through 2010, to13.1 per cent, followed by a moderate decline to 12.7 per cent in 2011. The report also pointsout that the unemployment rates of youth have proven to be more sensitive to the crisisthan the rates of adults and that the recovery of the job market for young men and women islikely to lag behind that of adults.
It adds that these trends will have “significant consequences for young people as upcomingcohorts of new entrants join the ranks of the already unemployed" and warns of the ”risk of acrisis legacy of a „lost generation5 comprised of young people who have dropped out of thelabour market, having lost all hope of being able to work for a decent living".
The ILO report points out that in developing economies, youth are more vulnerable tounderemployment and poverty.
Topic 2(选题二)
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