11月英语翻译资格考试真题回忆

11月英语翻译资格考试真题回忆
1. 英译汉第一篇：节选自The New York Times，原文标题为：Paris Employs a Few
Black Sheep to Tend, and Eat, a City Field
The archivists requested a donkey, but what they got from the mayor’s office were
four wary black sheep, which, as of Wednesday morning, were chewing away at a
lumpy field of grass beside the municipal archives building as the City of Paris’s
newest, shaggiest lawn mowers. Mayor Bertrand Delano has made the environment a
priority since his election in 2001, with popular bike- and car-sharing programs, an
expanded network of designated lanes for bicycles and buses, and an enormous project
to pedestrianize the banks along much of the Seine.
The sheep, which are to mow (and, not inconsequentially, fertilize) an airy
half- acre patch in the 19th District intended in the same spirit. City Hall refers to the
project as “eco-grazing,” and it notes that the four ewes will prevent the use of noisy,
gas-guzzling mowers and cut down on the use of herbicides.
Paris has plans for a slightly larger eco-grazing project not far from the archives
building, assuming all goes well; similar projects have been under way in smaller
towns in the region in recent years.
The sheep, from a rare, diminutive Breton breed called Ouessant, stand just about
two feet high. Chosen for their hardiness, city officials said, they will pasture here
until October inside a three-foot-high, yellow electrified fence.
“This is really not a one-shot deal,” insisted René Dutrey, the adjunct mayor for the
environment and sustainable development. Mr. Dutrey, a fast- talking man in
orange-striped Adidas Samba sneakers, noted that the sheep had cost the city a total of
just about $$335, though no further economic projections have been drawn up for the

time being.
A metal fence surrounds the grounds of the archives, and a security guard stands
watch at the gate, so there is little risk that local predators — large, unleashed dogs, for
instance — will be able to reach the ewes.
Curious humans, however, are encouraged to visit the sheep, and perhaps the
archives, too. The eco-grazing project began as an initiative to attract the public to the
archives, and informational panels have been put in place to explain what, exactly, the
sheep are doing here.
But the archivists have had to be trained to care for the animals. In the unlikely
event that a ewe should flip onto her back, Ms. Masson said, someone must rush to put
her back on her feet.
2. 英译汉第二篇：同样节选自The New York Times，原文标题为：N. Joseph
Woodland, Inventor of the Bar Code, Dies at 91
Norman Joseph Woodland was born in Atlantic City on Sept. 6, 1921. As a Boy
Scout he learned Morse code, the spark that would ignite his invention.
After spending World War II on the Manhattan Project , Mr. Woodland resumed his
studies at the Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia (it is now Drexel
University), earning a bachelor’s degree in 1947.
As an undergraduate, Mr. Woodland perfected a system for delivering elevator
music efficiently. He planned to pursue the project commercially, but his father, who
had come of age in “Boardwalk Empire”-era Atlantic City, forbade it: elevator music,
he said, was controlled by the mob, and no son of his was going to come within
spitting distance.
The younger Mr. Woodland returned to Drexel for a master’s degree. In 1948, a

local supermarket executive visited the campus, where he implored a dean to develop
an efficient means of encoding product data. The dean demurred, but Mr. Silver, a
fellow graduate student who overheard their conversation, was intrigued. He
conscripted Mr. Woodland.
An early idea of theirs, which involved printing product information in fluorescent
ink and reading it with ultraviolet light, proved unworkable.
But Mr. Woodland, convinced that a solution was close at hand, quit graduate
school to devote himself to the problem. He holed up at his grandparents’ home in
Miami Beach, where he spent the winter of 1948-49 in a chair in the sand, thinking.
To represent information visually, he realized, he would need a code. The only
code he knew was the one he had learned in the Boy Scouts.
What would happen, Mr. Woodland wondered one day, if Morse code, with its
elegant simplicity and limitless combinatorial potential, were adapted graphically? He
began trailing his fingers idly through the sand.
“What I’m going to tell you sounds like a fairy tale,” Mr. Woodland told
Smithsonian magazine in 1999. “I poked my four fingers into the sand and for
whatever reason — I didn’t know — I pulled my hand toward me and drew four lines.
Now I have four lines, and they could be wide lines and narrow lines instead of dots
and dashes.’ ”
Today, bar codes appears on the surface of almost every product of contemporary
life. All because a bright young man, his mind ablaze with dots and dashes, one day
raked his fingers through the sand.
3. 汉译英第一篇：中国式过马路
4. 汉译英第二篇：中国经济现状（工业、商业、金融、法制管理）