2014年5月份CATTI二级笔译实务(英译汉)真题 均出自《纽约时报》
1.乔布斯夫人的新闻报道(节选)
Marlene Castro knew the tall blonde woman only asLaurene, her mentor. They met every few weeks in arough Silicon Valley neighborhood the year that Ms.Castro was applying to college, and they e-mailedoften, bonding over conversations about Ms.Castro’s difficult childhood. Without Laurene’s help,Ms. Castro said, she might not have become the first person in her family to graduate fromcollege.
It was only later, when she was a freshman at University of California, Berkeley, that Ms. Castroread a news article and realized that Laurene was Silicon Valley royalty, the wife of Apple’s co-founder, Steven P. Jobs.
“I just became 10 times more appreciative of her humility and how humble she was in workingwith us in East Palo Alto,” Ms. Castro said.
The story, friends and colleagues say, is classic Laurene Powell Jobs. Famous because of herlast name and fortune, she has always been private and publicity-averse. Her philanthropicwork, especially on education causes like College Track, the college prep organization she helpedfound and through which she was Ms. Castro’s mentor, has been her priority and focus.
Now, less than two years after Mr. Jobs’s death, Ms. Powell Jobs is becoming somewhat lessprivate. She has tiptoed into the public sphere, pushing her agenda in education as well asglobal conservation, nutrition and immigration policy.
“She’s been mourning for a year and was grieving for five years before that,” said Larry Brilliant,who is an old friend of Mr. Jobs. “Her life was about her family and Steve, but she is nowemerging as a potent force on the world stage, and this is only the beginning.”
But she is doing it her way.
“It’s not about getting any public recognition for her giving, it’s to help touch and transformindividual lives,” said Laura Andreessen, a philanthropist and lecturer on philanthropy atStanford who has been close friends with Ms. Powell Jobs for two decades.
While some people said Ms. Powell Jobs should have started a foundation in Mr. Jobs’s nameafter his death, she did not, nor has she increased her public giving.
Instead, she has redoubled her commitment to Emerson Collective, the organization sheformed about a decade ago to make grants and investments in education initiatives and, morerecently, other areas.
“In the broadest sense, we want to use our knowledge and our network and our relationshipsto try to effect the greatest amount of good,” Ms. Powell Jobs said in one of a series ofinterviews with The New York Times.
2.关于人文学科衰落的新闻报道(删改)
In the past few years, I’ve taught nonfiction writing to undergraduates and graduate studentsat Harvard, Yale, and Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. Each semester I hope, andfear, that I will have nothing to teach my students because they already know how to write. Andeach semester I discover, again, that they don’t.
The teaching of the humanities has fallen on hard times. So says a new report on the state ofthe humanities by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and so says the experience ofnearly everyone who teaches at a college or university. Undergraduates will tell you that they’reunder pressure — from their parents, from the burden of debt they incur, from society atlarge — to choose majors they believe will lead as directly as possible to good jobs. Too often,that means skipping the humanities.
In other words, there is a new and narrowing vocational emphasis in the way students andtheir parents think about what to study in college.
There is a certain literal-mindedness in the recent shift away from the humanities. It suggestsa number of things.
One, the rush to make education pay off presupposes that only the most immediatelyapplicable skills are worth acquiring. Two, the humanities often do a bad job of explaining whythe humanities matter. And three, the humanities often do a bad job of teaching thehumanities.
What many undergraduates do not know — and what so many of their professors have beenunable to tell them — is how valuable the most fundamental gift of the humanities will turnout to be. That gift is clear thinking, clear writing and a lifelong engagement with literature.
Writing well used to be a fundamental principle of the humanities, as essential as theknowledge of mathematics and statistics in the sciences. But writing well isn’t merely autilitarian skill. It is about developing a rational grace and energy in your conversation withthe world around you.
