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2012年5月英語二級《筆譯實務》試題
Section 1: English-Chinese Translation（英譯漢）
Part A Compulsory Translation（必譯題）
The runaway success of Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium” trilogy suggests that when it comes to contemporary literature in translation, Americans are at least willing to read Scandinavian detective fiction. But for work from other regions, in other genres, winning the interest of big publishing houses and readers in the United States remains a steep uphill struggle.
Among foreign cultural institutes and publishers, the traditional American aversion to literature in translation is known as “the 3 percent problem.” But now, hoping to increase their minuscule share of the American book market — about 3 percent — foreign governments and foundations, especially those on the margins of Europe, are taking matters into their own hands and plunging into the publishing fray in the United States.
Increasingly, that campaign is no longer limited to widely spoken languages like French and German. From Romania to Catalonia to Iceland, cultural institutes and agencies are subsidizing publication of books in English, underwriting the training of translators, encouraging their writers to tour in the United States, submitting to American marketing and
promotional techniques they may have previously shunned and exploiting existing niches in the publishing industry.
“We have established this as a strategic objective, a long-term commitment to break through the American market,” said Corina Suteu, who leads the New York branch of the European Union National Institutes for Culture and directs the Romanian Cultural Institute. “For nations in Europe, be they small or large, literature will always be one of the keys of their cultural existence, and we recognize that this is the only way we are going to be able to make that literature present in the United States.”
For instance, the Dalkey Archive Press, a small publishing house in Champaign, Ill., that for more than 25 years has specialized in translated works, this year began a Slovenian Literature Series, underwritten by official groups in Slovenia, once part of Yugoslavia. The series’s first book, “Necropolis,” by Boris Pahor, is a powerful World War II concentration-camp memoir that has been compared to the best of Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi, and has been followed by Andrej Blatnik’s “You Do Understand,” a rather absurdist but still touching collection of sketches and parables about love and intimacy.
Dalkey has also begun or is about to begin similar series in Hebrew and Catalan, and with Switzerland and Mexico, the last of which will consist of four books yearly for six years. In each case a financing agency in the host country is subsidizing publication and participating in
promotion and marketing in the United States, an effort that can easily require $10,000 or more a book.
Part B Optional Translation（二選一題）
Topic 1 （選題一）
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Topic 2（選題二）
Just east of Argentina’s Andean foothills, an oil field called the Vaca Muerta — “dead
cow” in English — has finally come to life.
In May, the Argentine oil company YPF announced that it had found 150 million barrels of oil in the Patagonian field, and President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner rushed onto national television to praise the discovery as something that could give new impetus to the country’s long-stagnant economy.
“The importance of this discovery goes well beyond the volume,” said Sebastian Eskenazi, YPF’s chief executive, as he announced the find. “The important thing is it is something new: new energy, a new future, new expectations.”
Although there are significant hurdles, geologists say that the Vaca Muerta is a harbinger of a possible major expansion of global petroleum supplies over the next two decades as the industry uses advanced techniques to extract oil from shale and other tightly packed rocks.
Oil experts caution that geologists have only just begun to study shale fields in much of the world, and thus can only guess at their potential. Little seismic work has been completed, and core samples need to be retrieved from thousands of feet below the surface to judge how much oil or gas can be retrieved.
Argentina certainly has high hopes for shale oil from the southern Patagonian province of
Neuquen. The 150 million barrels of recoverable shale oil found in the Vaca Muerta represents an increase of 8 percent in Argentina’s reserves, and the find was the biggest discovery of oil in the country since the late 1980s.
Oil experts say the Vaca Muerta is probably just a start for Argentina, long a middle-ranked oil producer. Mr. Lynch noted that YPF had explored only 100 square miles out of 5,000 square miles in the whole shale deposit, and other oil companies working in the area had not announced any discoveries yet.
So far, nearly all of the oil exploration in the shale fields in Argentina and elsewhere has been pursued with traditional vertical wells. Plans are just beginning for horizontal drilling.
Some experts caution that the fast advance of oil production from shale in the United States is no guarantee of similar successes abroad, at least not in the near future.
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