2020年翻译资格考试二级笔译易考话题：新冠病毒
The world is entering a period of high-stakes experimentation, with cities and countries serving as open-air laboratories for how to most safely and effectively reopen amid the coronavirus.
Unable to wait indefinitely for science to answer every riddle about what makes infections spike in some circumstances and not others, governments are pushing ahead with policies built on a growing but imperfect understanding of the virus.
And with little consensus on how best to balance public health against social and economic needs, societies are feeling their way through trade-offs that would be gut-wrenching even with better information on any given policy’s likely cost in lives and livelihoods.
“We’re in the middle of a global trial-and-error period to try to find the best solution in a very difficult situation,” said Tom Inglesbury, who directs the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins University.
The first wave of reopenings, predominantly in Asia and Europe, are providing a preview of what could become a continual process of experimentation and recalibration.
Each policy, like distancing students at Danish schools or temperature checks at Hong Kong restaurants, however based in scientific knowledge and calculated cost-benefit, is also a trial of what works, what’s worthwhile and what people will accept.
Though experience bought in lives will convert some unknowns to knowns, many questions may remain unanswered for the duration of what is expected to be a one-to-two-year crisis.
That includes what may be the hardest but most urgent question of all: What is the value of a life saved?
Countries have little choice but to guess at stomach-turning ethical calculations. How many lives should be risked to save a thousand people from unemployment? To stop a generation of kids from falling behind in school? To salvage a sense of normalcy?
While Dr. Inglesbury stressed that “there are a lot of principles that are based on public health and common sense” to guide us, he also said, “There’s no road map for this.”
Navigating the Unknowns
在未知中航行
Many countries’ policies are shaped, in part, by how they navigate the gaps in knowledge about the virus.
For example: Does being outdoors drastically limit transmission?
Lithuania, on the belief that it does, is closing streets in the capital to allow restaurants and bars to open outdoor-only services.
Others are testing this hypothesis more tepidly. Bangkok is reopening parks but forbidding most activities that involve multiple people. Sydney is reopening beaches for swimming and surfing but not sunbathing or socializing.
Another mystery: How easily, and widely, do children transmit the virus?
Some countries are reopening schools, taking a calculated risk on indications that children might be relatively safe, while imposing restrictions in case they aren’t.
Denmark is opening schools to younger children, who are tentatively thought to be less at risk, but hedging with restrictions on class size.
Germany, meanwhile, is inviting back older children who, the thinking goes, might pose a higher risk of transmission but will better comply with rules on masks and distancing.
There is another set of unknowns: those pertaining to people’s behavior.
South Korea’s government is gambling on citizens voluntarily observing a litany of guidelines on everyday interactions, like bowing instead of hugging at funerals.
In other areas, it is less trusting, using fines and digital monitoring to enforce mandatory quarantines for those thought to have even come into contact with an infected person.
California will allow some businesses to offer curbside pickup, in the hopes that enough workers and consumers will embrace this, and safely enough to halt the economy’s free-fall without infections resurging.
Georgia, meanwhile, lifted restrictions on businesses only to find that customers were largely unwilling to come back.
口译： 翻译资格考试二级口译模拟题
笔译： 翻译资格考试二级笔译模拟题
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