2012年11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)
The archivists requested a donkey, but what theygot from the mayor’s office were four wary blacksheep, which, as of Wednesday morning, were chewing away at a lumpy field of grass besidethe municipal archives building as the City of Paris’s newest, shaggiest lawn mowers. MayorBertrand Delano? has made the environment a priority since his election in 2001, withpopular bike- and car-sharing programs, an expanded network of designated lanes forbicycles and buses, and an enormous project to pedestrianize the banks along much of theSeine.
The sheep, which are to mow (and, not inconsequentially, fertilize) an airy half-acre patch inthe 19th District intended in the same spirit. City Hall refers to the project as “eco-grazing,”and it notes that the four ewes will prevent the use of noisy, gas-guzzling mowers and cutdown on the use of herbicides.
Paris has plans for a slightly larger eco-grazing project not far from the archives building,assuming all goes well; similar projects have been under way in smaller towns in the region inrecent years.
The sheep, from a rare, diminutive Breton breed called Ouessant, stand just about two feethigh. Chosen for their hardiness, city officials said, they will pasture here until October inside athree-foot-high, yellow electrified fence.
“This is really not a one-shot deal,” insisted René Dutrey, the adjunct mayor for theenvironment and sustainable development. Mr. Dutrey, a fast-talking man in orange-stripedAdidas Samba sneakers, noted that the sheep had cost the city a total of just about $335,though no further economic projections have been drawn up for the time being.
A metal fence surrounds the grounds of the archives, and a security guard stands watch atthe gate, so there is little risk that local predators — large, unleashed dogs, for instance — willbe able to reach the ewes.
Curious humans, however, are encouraged to visit the sheep, and perhaps the archives, too.The eco-grazing project began as an initiative to attract the public to the archives, andinformational panels have been put in place to explain what, exactly, the sheep are doing here.
But the archivists have had to be trained to care for the animals. In the unlikely event that aewe should flip onto her back, Ms. Masson said, someone must rush to put her back on herfeet.
Part B Optional Translation(二选一题)
Topic 1 (选题一)
Norman Joseph Woodland was born in Atlantic City on Sept. 6, 1921. As a Boy Scout helearned Morse code, the spark that would ignite his invention.
After spending World War II on the Manhattan Project , Mr. Woodland resumed his studies atthe Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia (it is now Drexel University), earning abachelor’s degree in 1947.
As an undergraduate, Mr. Woodland perfected a system for delivering elevator musicefficiently. He planned to pursue the project commercially, but his father, who had come ofage in “Boardwalk Empire”-era Atlantic City, forbade it: elevator music, he said, was controlledby the mob, and no son of his was going to come within spitting distance.
The younger Mr. Woodland returned to Drexel for a master’s degree. In 1948, a localsupermarket executive visited the campus, where he implored a dean to develop an efficientmeans of encoding product data. The dean demurred, but Mr. Silver, a fellow graduate studentwho overheard their conversation, was intrigued. He conscripted Mr. Woodland.
An early idea of theirs, which involved printing product information in fluorescent ink andreading it with ultraviolet light, proved unworkable.
But Mr. Woodland, convinced that a solution was close at hand, quit graduate school todevote himself to the problem. He holed up at his grandparents’ home in Miami Beach, where hespent the winter of 1948-49 in a chair in the sand, thinking.
To represent information visually, he realized, he would need a code. The only code he knewwas the one he had learned in the Boy Scouts.
What would happen, Mr. Woodland wondered one day, if Morse code, with its elegantsimplicity and limitless combinatorial potential, were adapted graphically? He began trailing hisfingers idly through the sand.
“What I’m going to tell you sounds like a fairy tale,” Mr. Woodland told Smithsonian magazine in1999. “I poked my four fingers into the sand and for whatever reason — I didn’t know — Ipulled my hand toward me and drew four lines. Now I have four lines, and they could be widelines and narrow lines instead of dots and dashes.’ ”
Today, bar codes appears on the surface of almost every product of contemporary life. Allbecause a bright young man, his mind ablaze with dots and dashes, one day raked his fingersthrough the sand.
Topic 2(选题二)
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