商务英语翻译 I 练习(2014-15)

2014-2015学年第一学期商务英语翻译练习 1. Germany's recovery grinds to a halt

Economic recovery in the eurozone lost steam in the closing months of last year as Germany’s upturn ground to a halt, in a blow to the country’s new Government under Angela Merkel, the Chancellor.

An abrupt slowdown in Europe’s biggest economy saw Germany’s growth stagnate in the final quarter of 2005, after a robust expansion of 0.6 per cent in the previous three months, official figures showed.

The disappointing sudden standstill in Germany contributed to a halving in fourth- quarter GDP growth across the eurozone to a modest pace of only 0.3 per cent.

However, despite the bad news economists, investors and eurozone politicians all expressed confidence that both Germany and the eurozone would still enjoy a renewed acceleration in the opening months of this year.

A survey of 25,000 German companies by the country’s chamber of industry and commerce (DIHK) reported that the outlook for corporate investment was at its strongest for 11 years, while expectations for exports surged to a six-year high. The mood among services firms also brightened, with companies’ spirits buoyed by expectation of a boost for consumer spending from this year’s World Cup.

In a further counter to the gloomy GDP data, the closely-watched ZEW survey of sentiment among Germany’s investors dipped only slightly in February, with a headline confidence index of 69.8 — only a little below the two-year high of 70.0 set in January.

The ZEW economic think-tank said the results showed that optimism in German financial markets had ―stabilized at a high level‖, while the investment climate remained positive.

David Brown, an economist with Bear Stearns, backed the view of many other analysts yesterday that most of the ingredients for a strong revival in German economic activity this year remained in place.

“Business confidence is still operating at a high level, consumer optimism is building as the jobless rate trends lower, and real activity levels are continuing to pick up,‖ he said.

For now, yesterday’s official figures continued to show scant sign of any resurgence in German consumers’ willingness to spend. The country’s statistics office noted that domestic demand had ―contributed little‖ to the economy’s fourth-quarter showing.

It was unclear to what extent consumer spending may have been depressed at the end of last year by political uncertainties surrounding the creation of Germany’s ―grand coalition‖ Government of left and right under Frau Merkel.

In the meantime, fourth-quarter growth relied instead on what was described as ―highly dynamic‖ net trade, and on strong investment spending.

European finance ministers, meeting in Brussels, sought to brush aside the lackluster economic news and strike an optimistic tone over prospects for this year.

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2.1 What I Have Lived For By Bertrand Russell

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy --- ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness --- that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what --- at last --- I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much I have achieved.

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.

2.2 Youth

Samuel Ullman

Youth is not a time of life; it is not a matter of rosy cheeks, red lips and supple knees; it is a matter of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions; it is the freshness of the deep springs of life.

Youth means a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease. This often exists in a man of 60 more than a boy of 20. Nobody grows old merely by a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals.

Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. Worry, fear, self-distrust bow the heart and turn the spirit back to dust.

Whether 60 or 16, there is in every human being’s heart the lure of wonder, the unfailing childlike appetite of what’s next and the joy of the game of living. In the center of your heart and my heart there is

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a wireless station: so long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, courage and power from men and from the infinite, you and I will remain young.

When the aerials are down, and your spirit is covered with snows of cynicism and the ice of pessimism, then you are grown old, even at 20, but as long as your aerials are up to catch waves of optimism, there is hope you may have a young heart at 80.

3. Genius Sacrificed for Failure Dr. William N. Brown

During my youth in America’s Appalachian mountains, I learned that farmers preferred sons over daughters, largely because boys were better at heavy farm labor (though what boys anywhere could best the tireless Hui’an girls in the field of Fujian!)

With only 3% of American in agriculture today, brain has supplanted brawn, yet cultural preferences, like bad habits, are easier to make than break. But history warns repeatedly of the tragic cost of dismissing too casually the gifts of the so-called weaker sex.

About 150 years ago, a village church vicar in Yorkshire, England, had three lovely, intelligent daughters but his hopes hinged entirely on the sole male heir, Branwell, a youth with remarkable talent in both art and literature.

Branwell’s father and sisters hoarded their pennies to pack him off to London’s Royal Academy of Arts, but if art was his calling, he dialed a wrong number. Within weeks he hightailed it home, a penniless failure.

Hopes still high, the family landed Branwell a job as a private tutor, hoping this would free him to develop his literary skills and achieve the success and fame that he deserved. Failure again.

For years the selfless sisters squelched their own goals, farming themselves out as teachers and governesses in support of their increasingly indebted brother, convinced the world must eventually recognize his genius. As failures multiplied, Branwell turned to alcohol, then opium, and eventually died as he had lived: a failure. So died hope in the one male – but what of the three anonymous sisters?

During Branwell’s last years, the girls published a book of poetry at their own expense (under a pseudonym, for fear of reviewer’s bias against females).Even Branwell might have snickered: they sold only 2 copies.

Undaunted, They continued in their spare time, late at night by candlelight, to pour out their pent-up emotion, writing of what they knew best, of women in conflict with their natural desires and social condition – in reality, less fiction than autobiography! And 19th century literature was transformed by Anne’s Agnes Grey, Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Charlotte’s Jane Eyre.

But years of sacrifice for Banwell had taken their toll. Emily took ill at her brother’s funeral and died within 3 months, aged 29; Anne died 5 months later, aged 30; Charlotte lived only to age 39.If only they had been nurtured instead of sacrificed.

No one remember Branwell’s name, much less his art or literature, but Bronte sisters’ tragically shot lives teach us even more of life than of literature. Their sacrificed genius cries out to us that in modern

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society we must value children not by their physical strength or sexual gender, as we would any mere beast of burden, but by their integrity, strength, commitment, courage--spiritual qualities abundant in both boys and girls. China, a nation blessed by more boys and girls than any nation, ignores at her own peril the lesson of the Bronte tragedy.

Patrick Bronte fathered Branwell, but more importantly, he fathered Anne, Emily and Charlotte. Were he alive today he would surely urge us to put away our passé prejudices and avoid his own tragic and irrevocable error of putting all of his eggs in one male basket!

4. Nature and Art

James Whistler

Nature contains the elements, in colour and form, of all pictures, as the keyboard contains the notes of all music.

But the artist is born to pick, and choose, and group with science, these elements, that the result may be beautiful---as the musician gathers his notes, and forms his chords, until he brings forth from chaos glorious harmony.

To say to the painter, that nature is to be taken as she is, is to say to the player, that he may sit on the piano.

The dignity of the snow-capped mountain is lost in distinctness, but the joy of the tourist is to recognize the traveler on the top. The desire to see, for the sake of seeing, is, with the mass, alone the one to be gratified, hence the delight in detail.

And when the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry, as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become campanili, and the warehouses are palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and fairy-land is before us---then the wayfarer hastens home; the working man and the cultured one, the wise man and the one of pleasure, cease to understand, as they have ceased to see, and Nature, who, for once, has sung in tune, sings her exquisite song to the artist alone, her son and her master---her son in that he loves her, her master in that he knows her.

To him her secrets are unfolded, to him her lessons have become gradually clear. He looks at her flower, not with the enlarging lens, that he may gather facts for the botanist, but with the light of the one who sees in her choice selection of brilliant tones and delicate tints, suggestions of future harmonies.

He does not confine himself to purposeless copying, without thought, each blade of grass, as commended by the inconsequent, but, in the long curve of the narrow leaf, corrected by the straight tall stem, he learns how grace is wedded to dignity, how strength enhances sweetness, that elegance shall be the result.

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In the citron wing of the pale butterfly, with its dainty spots of oranges, he sees before him the stately halls of fair gold, with their slender saffron pillars, and is taught how the delicate drawing high upon the walls shall be traced in tender tones of orpiment, and repeated by the base in notes of graver hue.

In all that is dainty and lovable he finds hints for his own combinations, and thus is Nature ever his resource and always at his service, and to him is naught refused.

Through his brain, ad through the last alembic, is distilled the refined essence of that thought which began with the Gods, and which they left him to carry out.

Set apart by them to complete their works, he produces that wondrous thing called the masterpiece, which surpasses in perfection all that they have contrived in what is called Nature; and the Gods stand by and marvel, and perceive how far away more beautiful is the Venus of Melos than was their own Eve.

---from the Oxford Book of English Prose

5. China’s 4 Major Economic Regions

In recent years, China has formed four major economic regions: the Pearl River Delta area, Yangtze River Delta area, Beijing Tianjin Hebei cities, and the large Northeastern China cities. Each of these regions, with its own specific strengths, has become an important engine propelling the economy’s rapid growth.

Aggregate Economy Rankings

GDP has become the main index for assessment of aggregate economic development. The Yangtze River Delta region ranked first among the four regions in terms of GDP, reaching RMB2379.8 billion in 2003, an increase of RMB 381.5 billion over the previous year. The 16 cities that comprise this area realized an average growth of 14.8% over the prior year. The Beijing Tianjin Hebei cluster of cities’ GDP ranked second at RMB 1309.4 billion in 2003, posing an increase of 12.2% over 2002. The Northeastern China cluster of cities (three Northeast Chinese provinces) realized RMB1295.7 billion in GDP, presenting an average growth of 10.7%. The Pearl River Delta area’s GDP was RMB 1133.5 billion in 2003, ranking fourth among the four, and RMB191.6 billion more than that of the previous year, achieving the fastest average growth rate of 15.5%.

Investment in fixed assets

Among the four economic regions, the Yangtze River Delta area had the highest level of fixed asset investments in 2003 at RMB1097.4 billion, up 38.9% year on year. Investment in the Pearl River Delta area was up 27.8% to RMB373.1 billion. The growth of the Beijing Tianjin Hebei cluster of cities and the big Northeast China cluster of cities, however, was 6.5% lower than the national average. Investment in fixed assets of the Beijing Tianjin Hebei cluster of cities came in at RMB452.9 billion in 2003, down 2.1% year on year; the Northeast China cluster of cities had RMB352.9 billion in investments, up 1.2%. The total fixed asset investment of the four economic areas reached RMB2276.2 billion in 2003, rising 20.2% over 2002, accounting for 41.3% of the national total.

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