02级翻译试题
作者： 发表日期：2005-11-25 浏览次数：

江南的注册网址2004--2005学年第一学期翻译考试试卷

I. Translate the following extracts into Chinese. (50 points)

When the skies are clear and the Moon is not too bright, the Reverend Robert Evans, a quiet and cheerful man, lugs a bulky telescope onto the back sun-deck of his home in the Blue Mountains of Australia, about 80 kilometres west of Sydney, and does an extraordinary thing. He looks deep into the past and finds dying stars.

Looking into the past is, of course, the easy part. Glance at the night sky and what you see is history and lots of it – not the stars as they are now but as they were when their light left them. For all we know, the North Star, our faithful companion, might actually have burned out last January or in 1854 or at any time since the early fourteenth century and news of it just hasn’t reached us yet. The best we can say – can ever say – is that it was still burning on this date 680 years ago. Stars die all the time. What Bob Evans does better than anyone else who has ever tried is spot these moments of celestial farewell.

By day, Evans is a kindly and now semi-retired minister in the Uniting Church in Australia, who does a bit of locum work and researches the history of nineteenth-century religious movements. But by night he is, in his unassuming way, a titan of the skies. He hunts supernovae.

A supernova occurs when a giant star, one much bigger than our own Sun, collapses and then spectacularly explodes, releasing in an instant the energy of a hundred billion suns, burning for a time more brightly than all the stars in its galaxy. ‘It’s like a trillion hydrogen bombs going off at once,’ says Evans. If a supernova explosion happened within five hundred light years of us, we would be goners, according to Evans – ‘it would wreck the show,’ as he cheerfully puts it. But the universe is vast and supernovae are normally much too far away to harm us. In fact, most are so unimaginably distant that their light reaches us as no more than the faintest twinkle. For the month or so that they are visible, all that distinguishes them from the other stars in the sky is that they occupy a point of space that wasn’t filled before. It is these anomalous, very occasional pricks in the crowded dome of the night sky that the Reverend Evans finds.

II. Translate the following paragraph into English. (50 points)

　　1999年秋天，我刚来上海，没什么朋友，只能整天泡在酒吧里，在那里用一台老式手提电脑写点儿东西。那个时候，我最喜欢的是延长路平型关路口的清平檐。就像它的名字一样，这家里外都有些破落的酒吧，晦暗地矗立在梧桐落叶中，无形的颓废差不多就要把它掩埋了，二楼欧洲风格的布艺沙发又大又软，当初肯定是很奢侈的，不过我到上海的时候，它们都已经半旧了，对于清平檐来说，我来得太晚，没有赶上她的繁华盛世。但是对于上海来说，也许我来的正逢其时，1999年的上海，人们脸上总是洋溢着某种焦灼的气息，这种焦灼是积极的，骨子里有一种蒸腾的味道。然而，这种气息却不容易感染我，一个白天不上街，晚上不看新闻的人，不大容易被那种所谓的大时代气息感染。

答案见下页。

参考答案：

I. 英译汉：50分

寡言少语、性格开朗的罗伯特·伊文思牧师住在澳大利亚距悉尼80公里的蓝山，每到天空晴朗月光柔和的夜晚，他就把一架笨重的天体望远镜拖到自家后面的阳台，去做一件出乎寻常的事情：探测遥远的过去，寻找正在陨灭的星体。

当然，眺望过去是比较容易的事。瞥一眼夜空，你看到的都是历史，有多少颗星就有多少部历史，因为你看到的不是星体现在的状况，而是光发射出来时候的状况。以我们所知，忠实的伙伴北极星可能在去年一月或1854年或14世纪初期以来的任何时候就已经亮到头了，只是这一消息我们还不知道而已。我们只能说（也永远只能说），在680年前的今天它还在亮着。不断有星体殒灭，伊文思比其他夜观星象者做得更好的是他发现了天体告别的时刻。

白天，伊文思是澳大利亚联合教会的一位和善的半退休牧师，边做一些代理工作边研究19世纪宗教运动史。到了晚上，他就是一个不折不扣的太空头领，专门寻找“超新星”。

“超新星”的出现，是一个比太阳大得多的巨大星体崩溃，发生壮丽的爆炸景观，瞬时释放出相当于一千亿个太阳的能量，在一段时间中发出比星系中其他星球更多的亮光。伊文思说：“就像一万亿个氢弹同时爆炸。”按他的说法，如果超新星的爆炸距离我们不到500光年的话，我们就会灰飞烟灭。他戏称：“那就都没戏看了”。好在宇宙浩瀚，超新星通常距离我们很远，不足以造成危害。事实上，多数超新星离我们的距离超出平常的想象，其亮光在我们看来只不过是非常微弱的闪烁而已。超新星能被看见的时间一般为一个月左右，这是它们与其他星星的差别就是占据了一个以前空着的空间位置。伊文思牧师寻找的就是这样一些在拥挤的夜空中超乎寻常、非常偶然的闯入者。

II. 汉译英：50分

When I came to Shanghai in fall 1999, I had no friend in this city so I would frequent the pubs and do my writing with my dated laptop. At that time, the pub I enjoyed most was the Recluse Eaves. Just as its name might have suggested, it was a dilapidated house, standing dismally amongst the falling leaves of the phoenix trees. It was almost fully immersed in the invisible decadence: the European-style fabric sofas on the second floor, which were spacious and gentle, must have been sheer luxurious when they were new; however, before I was able to get acquainted with them personally, they were already pretty worn. I may have come too late for the prosperity peak of the Recluse, but I was certainly just in time for Shanghai because, in 1999, everyone in the metropolis had an air of anxiousness, exhibiting the energetic spirits right inside their bones. Nevertheless, I was not easily stirred by this air, for I would refuse to go out during the day and decline watching the news at night.

（史宝辉译）