1、翻译二级笔译实务分类模拟题 10及答案解析(总分：100.00，做题时间：90 分钟)一、English-Chinese Tran(总题数：5，分数：100.00)1.LONDONWebster“s Dictionary defines plague as “anything that afflicts or troubles; calamity; scourge.“ Further definitions include “any contagious epidemic disease that is deadly; esp., bubonic plague“ and, from the B
2、ible , “any of various calamities sent down as divine punishment.“ The verb form means “to vex; harass; trouble; torment.“ In Albert Camus“ novel, The Plague , written soon after the Nazi occupation of France, the first sign of the epidemic is rats dying in numbers: “They came up from basements and
3、cubby-holes, cellars and drains, in long swaying lines; they staggered in the light, collapsed and died, right next to people. At night, in corridors and side-streets, one could clearly hear the tiny squeaks as they expired. In the morning, on the outskirts of town, you would find them stretched out
4、 in the gutter with a little floret of blood on their pointed muzzles, some blown up and rotting, other stiff, with their whiskers still standing up.“ The rats are messengers, buthuman nature being what it istheir message is not immediately heeded. Life must go on. There are errands to run, money to
5、 be made. The novel is set in Oran, an Algerian coastal town of commerce and lassitude, where the heat rises steadily to the point that the sea changes color, deep blue turning to a “sheen of silver or iron, making it painful to look at.“ Even when people start to dietheir lymph nodes swollen, black
6、ish patches spreading on their skin, vomiting bile, gasping for breaththe authorities“ response is hesitant. The word “plague“ is almost unsayable. In exasperation, the doctor-protagonist tells a hastily convened health commission: “I don“t mind the form of words. Let“s just say that we should not a
7、ct as though half the town were not threatened with death, because then it would be.“ The sequence of emotions feels familiar. Denial is followed by faint anxiety, which is followed by concern, which is followed by fear, which is followed by panic. The phobia is stoked by the sudden realization that
8、 there are uncontrollable dark forces, lurking in the drains and the sewers, just beneath life“s placid surface. The disease is a leveler, suddenly everyone is vulnerable, and the moral strength of each individual is tested. The plague is on everyone“s minds, when it“s not in their bodies. Questions
9、 multiply: What is the chain of transmission? How to isolate the victims? Plague and epidemics are a thing of the past, of course they are. Physical contact has been cut to a minimum in developed societies. Devices and their digital messages direct our lives. It is not necessary to look into someone
10、“s eyes let alone touch their skin in order to become, somehow, intimate. Food is hermetically sealed. Blood, secretions, saliva, pus, bodily fluidsthese are things with which hospitals deal, not matters of daily concern. A virus contracted in West Africa, perhaps by a man hunting fruit bats in a tr
11、opical forest to feed his family, and cutting the bat open, cannot affect a nurse in Dallas, Texas, who has been wearing protective clothing as she tended a patient who died. Except that it does. “Pestilence is in fact very common,“ Camus observes, “but we find it hard to believe in a pestilence whe
12、n it descends upon us.“ The scary thing is that the bat that carries the virus is not sick. It is simply capable of transmitting the virus in the right circumstances. In other words, the virus is always lurking even if invisible. It is easily ignored until it is too late. Pestilence, of course, is a
13、 metaphor as well as a physical fact. It is not just blood oozing from gums and eyes, diarrhea and vomiting. A plague had descended on Europe as Camus wrote. The calamity and slaughter were spreading through the North Africa where he had passed his childhood. This virus hopping today from Africa to
14、Europe to the United States has come in a time of beheadings and unease. People put the phenomena together as denial turns to anxiety and panic. They sense the stirring of uncontrollable forces. They want to be wrong but they are not sure they are. At the end of the novel, the doctor contemplates a
15、relieved throng that has survived: “He knew that this happy crowd was unaware of something that one can read in books, which is that the plague bacillus never dies or vanishes entirely, that it can remain dormant for dozens of years in furniture or clothing, that it waits patiently in bedrooms, cell
16、ars, trunks, handkerchiefs and old papers, and that perhaps the day will come when, for the instruction or misfortune of mankind, the plague will rouse its rats and send them to die in some well-contented city.“ （分数：20.00）_2.PARIS-When France won its second Nobel Prize in less than a week on Monday,
17、 this time for economics, Prime Minister Manuel Valls quickly took to Twitter, insisting with no shortage of pride that the accomplishment was a loud rebuke for those who say that France is a nation in decline. “After Patrick Modiano, another Frenchman in the firmament: Congratulations to Jean Tirol
18、e!“ Mr. Valls wrote. “What a way to thumb one“s nose at French bashing! Proud of France.“ Some in the country were already giddy after Mr. Modiano, a beloved author, whose concise and moody novels are often set in France during the Nazi occupation, won the Nobel Prize for literature last week. The a
19、ward helped to raise the global stature of Mr. Modiano, whose three books published in the United Statestwo novels and a children“s bookbefore the Nobel had collectively sold fewer than 8,000 copies. Joining in the chorus, Le Monde suggested in an editorial that at a time of rampant French-bashing,
20、Mr. Modiano“s achievement was something of a vindication for a country where Nobel Prizes in literature flow more liberally than oil. Mr. Modiano was the 15th French writer, including Sartre and Camus, to win the award. Yet this being France, a country where dissatisfaction can be worn like an acces
21、sory, some intellectuals, economists and critics greeted the awards with little more than a shrug at a time when the economy has been faltering, Paris has lost influence to Berlin and Brussels, the far-right National Front has been surging, and Francois Hollande has become one of the most unpopular
22、French presidents in recent history. Others sniffed haughtily that while France was great at culture, it remained economically and politically prostrate. Even Mr. Modiano may have unintentionally captured the national mood when, informed of his prize by his editor, he said he found it “strange“ and
23、wanted to know why the Nobel committee had selected him. Even Mr. Modiano may have unintentionally captured the national mood when, informed of his prize by his editor, he said he found it “strange“ and wanted to know why the Nobel committee had selected him. Alain Finkielkraut, a professor of philo
24、sophy at the elite Polytechnique, who recently published a book criticizing what he characterized as France“s descent into conformity and multiculturalism, said that rather than showing that France was on the ascent, the fetishizing of the Nobel Prizes by the French political elite revealed the coun
25、try“s desperation. “I find the idea that the Nobels are being used as a riposte to French-bashing idiotic,“ he said. “Our education system is totally broken, and the Nobel Prize doesn“t change anything. I have a lot of affection for Mr. Modiano, but I think Philip Roth deserved it much more. To talk
26、 that all in France is going well and that the pessimism is gone is absurd. France is doing extremely badly. There is an economic crisis. There is a crisis of integration. I am not going to be consoled by these medals made of chocolate.“ Robert Frank, a history professor emeritus at the University o
27、f Paris 1Sorbonne, and the author of The Fear of Decline, France From 1914 to 2014 , echoed that the self-aggrandizement that had greeted the prizes among the French establishment reflected a country lacking in self-confidence. In earlier centuries, he noted, the prize had been greeted as something
28、obvious. When French writers or intellectuals won Nobels in the mid-20th century, “there was no jolt at that time, because France still saw itself as important, so there wasn“t much to add to that,“ he said. “Today, it may help some people to show that France still counts in certain places in the wo
29、rld. This doesn“t fix the crisis of unemployment, however, that is sapping this society.“ In academic economic circles, Mr. Tirole“s winning the 2014 Nobel in economic science for his work on the best way to regulate large, powerful firms, was greeted as a fitting tribute to a man whose work had exe
30、rted profound influence. It added to an already prominent year for French economists, as seen from Thomas Piketty“s book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century , which became an immediate best-seller when translated into English six months ago. Mr. Tirole“s work gained particular attention after the 2
31、008 financial crisis, which revealed problems in the regulation of financial firms in the United States and Europe. But some noted the paradox of the award going to an economist from a nation where the economy was less than shimmering, and where many businesses and critics bemoan a culture of excess
32、ive red tape. Others like Sean Safford, an associate professor of economic sociology at Institut （分数：20.00）_3.“Wisdom of the Crowd“: The Myths and RealitiesAre the many wiser than the few? Phil Ball explores the latest evidence on what can make groups of people smarterbut can also make them wildly w
33、rong. Is The Lord of the Rings the greatest work of literature of the 20th Century? Is The Shawshank Redemption the best movie ever made? Both have been awarded these titles by public votes. You don“t have to be a literary or film snob to wonder about the wisdom of so-called “wisdom of the crowd“, I
34、n an age routinely denounced as selfishly individualistic, it“s curious that a great deal of faith still seems to lie with the judgment of the crowd, especially when it can apparently be far off the mark. Yet there is some truth underpinning the idea that the masses can make more accurate collective
35、 judgments than expert individuals. So why is a crowd sometimes right and sometimes disastrously wrong? The notion that a group“s judgement can be surprisingly good was most compellingly justified in James Surowiecki“s 2005 book The Wisdom of Crowds , and is generally traced back to an observation b
36、y Charles Darwin“s cousin Francis Galton in 1907. Galton pointed out that the average of all the entries in a “guess the weight of the ox“ competition at a country fair was amazingly accuratebeating not only most of the individual guesses but also those of alleged cattle experts. This is the essence
37、 of the wisdom of crowds: their average judgment converges on the right solution. Still, Surowiecki also pointed out that the crowd is far from infallible. He explained that one requirement for a good crowd judgement is that people“s decisions are independent of one another. If everyone let themselv
38、es be influenced by each other“s guesses, there“s more chance that the guesses will drift towards a misplaced bias. This undermining effect of social influence was demonstrated in 2011 by a team at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. They asked groups of participants to estima
39、te certain quantities in geography or crime, about which none of them could be expected to have perfect knowledge but all could hazard a guessthe length of the Swiss-Italian border, for example, or the annual number of murders in Switzerland. The participants were offered modest financial rewards fo
40、r good group guesses, to make sure they took the challenge seriously. The researchers found that, as the amount of information participants were given about each other“s guesses increased, the range of their guesses got narrower, and the centre of this range could drift further from the true value.
41、In other words, the groups were tending towards a consensus, to the detriment of accuracy. This finding challenges a common view in management and politics that it is best to seek consensus in group decision making. What you can end up with instead is herding towards a relatively arbitrary position.
42、 Just how arbitrary depends on what kind of pool of opinions you start off with, according to subsequent work by one of the ETH team, Frank Schweitzer, and his colleagues. They say that if the group generally has good initial judgement, social influence can refine rather than degrade their collectiv
43、e decision. No one should need warning about the dangers of herding among poorly informed decision-makers: copycat behaviour has been widely regarded as one of the major contributing factors to the financial crisis, and indeed to all financial crises of the past. The Swiss team commented that this d
44、etrimental herding effect is likely to be even greater for deciding problems for which no objectively correct answer exists, which perhaps explains how democratic countries occasionally elect such astonishingly inept leaders. There“s another key factor that makes the crowd accurate, or not. It has l
45、ong been argued that the wisest crowds are the most diverse. That“s a conclusion supported in a 2004 study by Scott Page of the University of Michigan and Lu Hong of Loyola University in Chicago. They showed that, in a theoretical model of group decision-making, a diverse group of problem-solvers ma
46、de a better collective guess than that produced by the group of best-performing solvers. In other words, diverse minds do better, when their decisions are averaged, than expert minds. In fact, here“s a situation where a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. A study in 2011 by a team led by Jose
47、ph Simmons of the Yale School of Management in New Haven, Connecticut found that group predictions about American football results were skewed away from the real outcomes by the over-confidence of the fans“ decisions, which biased them towards alleged “favourites“ in the outcomes of games. All of th
48、ese findings suggest that knowing who is in the crowd, and how diverse they are, is vital before you attribute to them any real wisdom. Could there also be ways to make an existing crowd wiser? Last month, Anticline Davis-Stober of the University of Missouri and his co-workers presented calculations
49、 at a conference on Collective Intelligence that provide a few answers. They first refined the statistical definition of what it means for a crowd to be wisewhen, exactly, some aggregate of crowd judgments can be considered better than those of selected individuals. This definition allowed the researchers to develop guidelines for improving the wisdom of a group. Previous work might imply that you should a
