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Section 1:
English-Chinese Translation(英譯漢)(60 point) The time for this section is 100 minutes.
Part A Compulsory Translation (必譯題)(30 points)
It was one of those days that the peasant fishermen on this tributary of the Amazon River dream about.
With water levels falling rapidly at the peak of the dry season, a giant school of bass, a tasty fish that fetches a good price at markets, was swimming right into the nets being cast from a dozen small canoes here.
“With a bit of luck, you can make $350 on a day like this,” Lauro Souza Almeida, a leader of the local fishermen’s cooperative, exulted as he moved into position. “That is a fortune for people like us,” he said, the equivalent of four months at the minimum wage earned by those fortunate enough to find work.
But hovering nearby was a large commercial fishing vessel, a “mother boat” equipped with large ice chests for storage and hauling more than a dozen smaller craft. The crew on board was just waiting for the remainder of the fish to move into the river’s main channel, where they intended to scoop up as many as they could with their efficient gill nets.
A symbol of abundance to the rest of the world, the Amazon is experiencing a crisis of overfishing. As stocks of the most popular species diminish to worrisome levels, tensions are growing between subsistence fishermen and their commercial rivals, who are eager to enrich their bottom line and satisfy the growing appetite for fish of city-dwellers in Brazil and abroad.
In response, peasants up and down the Amazon, here in Brazil and in neighboring countries like Peru, are forming cooperatives to control fish catches and restock their rivers and lakes. But that effort, increasingly successful, has only encouraged the commercial fishing operations, as well as some of the peasants’ less disciplined neighbors, to step up their depredations.
“The industrial fishing boats, the big 20- to 30-ton vessels, they have a different mentality than us artisanal fishermen, who have learned to take the protection of the environment into account,” said the president of the local fishermen’s union. “They want to sweep everything up with their dragnets and then move on, benefiting from our work and sacrifice and leaving us with nothing.”
Part B Optional Translations (二選一題) (30 points)
Topic 1 (選題一)
Ever since the economist David Ricardo offered the basic theory in 1817, economic scripture has taught that open trade—free of tariffs, quotas, subsidies or other government distortions—improves the well-being of both parties. U.S. policy has implemented this doctrine with a vengeance. Why is free trade said to be universally beneficial? The answer is a doctrine called “comparative advantage”.
Here’s a simple analogy. If a surgeon is highly skilled both at doing operations and performing routine blood tests, it’s more efficient for the surgeon to concentrate on the surgery and pay a less efficient technician to do the tests, since that allows the surgeon to make the most efficient use of her own time.
By extension, even if the United States is efficient both at inventing advanced biotechnologies and at the routine manufacture of medicines, it makes sense for the United States to let the production work migrate to countries that can make the stuff more cheaply. Americans get the benefit of the cheaper products and get to spend their resources on even more valuable pursuits, That, anyway, has always been the premise. But here Samuelson dissents. What if the lowerwage country also captures the advanced industry?
If enough higher-paying jobs are lost by American workers to outsourcing, he calculates, then the gain from the cheaper prices may not compensate for the loss in U.S. purchasing power.
“Free trade is not always a win-win situation,” Samuelson concludes. It is particularly a problem, he says, in a world where large countries with far lower wages, like India and China, are increasingly able to make almost any product or offer almost any service performed in the United States.
If America trades freely with them, then the powerful drag of their far lower will begin dragging down U.S. average wages. The U.S. economy may still grow, he calculates, but at a lower rate than it otherwise would have.
