2012年英语翻译二级笔译实务模拟试题1

Section Ⅰ English-Chinese Translation
Translate the following two passages into Chinese.
1
Part A Compulsory Translation
     For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death. In the less than two decades of their use, the synthetic pesticides have been so thoroughly distributed throughout the animate and inanimate world that they occur virtually everywhere. They have been recovered from most of the major river systems and even from streams of groundwater flowing unseen through the earth. Residues of these chemicals linger in soil to which they may have been applied a dozen years before. They have entered and lodged in the bodies of fish, birds, reptiles, and domestic and wild animals so universally that scientists carrying on animal experiments find it almost impossible to locate subjects free from such contamination. They have been found in fish in remote mountain lakes, in
earthworms burrowing in soil, in the eggs of birds—and in man himself. For these chemicals are now stored in the bodies of the vast majority of human beings, regardless of age. They occur in the mother's milk, and probably in the tissues of the unborn child.
     All this has come about because of the sudden rise and prodigious growth of an industry for the production of man-made or synthetic chemicals with insecticidal properties. This industry is a child of the Second World War. In the course of developing agents of chemical warfare, some of the
chemicals created in the laboratory were found to be lethal to insects. The discovery did not come by chance: insects were widely used to test chemicals as agents of death for man.
    The result has been a seemingly endless stream of synthetic insecticides.
    What sets the new synthetic insecticides apart is their enormous biological potency. They have immense power not merely to poison but to enter into the most vital processes of the body and change them in sinister and often deadly ways. Thus, as we shall see, they destroy the very enzymes whose function is to protect the body from harm, they block the oxidation processes from which the body receives its energy, they prevent the normal functioning of various organs, and they may initiate in certain cells the slow and irreversible change that leads to malignancy.

Part B Choice of Two Translations
    The theory of evolution by natural selection was put forward in the 1850s independently by two men. One was Charles Darwin; the other was Alfred Russel Wallace. Both men had some scientific background, of course, but at heart both men were naturalists. Darwin had been a medical student at
Edinburgh University for two years, before his father who was a wealthy doctor proposed that he might become a clergyman and sent him to Cambridge. Wallace, whose parents were poor and who had left school at 14, had followed courses at Working Men's Institutes in London and Leicester as a
surveyor's apprentice and pupil teacher.
    The fact is that there are two traditions of explanation that march side by side in the ascent of man. One is the analysis of the physical structure of the world. The other is the study of the processes of life: their delicacy, their diversity, the wavering cycles from life to death in the individual and in the species. And these traditions do not come together until the theory of evolution; because until then there is a paradox which cannot be resolved, which cannot be begun, about life.
    The paradox of the life sciences, which makes them different in kind from physical science, is in the detail of nature everywhere. We see it about us in the birds, the trees, the grass, the snails, in every living thing. It is this, the manifestations of life, its expressions, its forms,
are so diverse that they must contain a large element of the accidental. And yet the nature of life is so uniform that it must be constrained by many necessities.

    So it is not surprising that biology as we understand it begins with naturalists in the 18th and 19th centuries: observers of the countryside, bird-watchers, clergymen, doctors, gentlemen of leisure in country houses. I am tempted to call them, simply, "gentlemen in Victorian England ", because it cannot be an accident that the theory of evolution is conceived twice by two men living at the same time in the same culture—the culture of Queen Victoria in England.

Section Ⅱ Chinese-English Translation Translate the following two passages into English.
3Part A Compulsory Translation
   中国等发展中国家向美国提了大量价廉物美的商品，是美国传统制造业腾出财力物力用于发展高新技术。这加快了美国工业的升级换代，推进了美国产业结构的优化，使美国及时摆脱传统工业的束缚，保持了它在世界经济中的领先地位。因此，中国的出口不会威胁美国的经济。
   在中国扩大出口的同时，进口也在快速增长。实际上，美国产品早已进人中国百姓的日常生活。现在，不少中国人乘坐的是波音飞机，开的是别克轿车，看的是美国电影，穿的是苹果牌牛仔裤，喝的是可口可乐，用的是摩托罗拉手机和IBM电脑，而电脑里运行的是微软软件。

   中国进出口能力的不断提高为包括美国经济在内的世界经济做出了积极贡献。

Part B Choice of Two Translations
    阿尔伯特·爱因斯坦(Albert Einstein)出生于德国南部的一个犹太中产阶级家庭。母亲非常喜欢音乐。爱因斯坦受她的影响很大。她鼓励小爱因斯坦对小提琴和古典音乐的爱好。他的父亲，一位工程师，对爱因斯坦的影响甚微。不过，是他送给了他五岁儿子那个著名的玩具指南针，促发了小爱因斯坦的第一次“思想试验”：玩具
中的针为什么总是指向北?
    爱因斯坦后来成为一位伟大的物理学家。他是那个科学独领风骚的世纪的著名科学家。那个时代的一些标志性科研成果，如原子弹、量子物理学以及电子学，无不带有他的烙印。即使现在，科学家们仍为广义相对论表现出的胆识所折服。他们认为他的思想已超出了科学范围，影响着从绘画到诗歌的现代文化。