北京外国语大学2003年英汉同声传译专业考研试题
Ⅰ.将下列短文译成汉语(25分)
While assembling a new national security team, President George W. Bush is confronting what could become the biggest challenge of his second term: how to contain Iran’s nuclear program and what Americans believe is its support of violence in Israel and insurgents in Iraq.
In an eerie repetition of the prelude to the Iraq, hawks in the administration and congress are trumpeting ominous disclosures about Iran’s nuclear capacities to make the case that Iran is a threat that must be confronted, either by economic sanctions, military action, or regime change.
But Britain, France and Germany are urging diplomacy, placing their hopes in a deal brokered by the Europeans in the past week in which Iran agreed to suspend its uranium enrichment program in return for discussions about future economic benefits.
Secretary of State Colin Powell thrust himself into the debate on Wednesday by commenting to reporters while on the way to Chile that fresh intelligence showed that Iran was “actively working” on a program to enable its missiles to carry nuclear bombs, a development he said “should be of concern to all parties.”
The disclosures alluded to by Powell were seen by hard-liners in the administration as another sign of Iranian perfidy, and by Europeans as nothing new. Although Powell has praised the negotiations between the Europeans and Iran, an administration official said there was “a steady tightening of outlook between hawks and doves” that Iran will use the negotiations as a pretext to continue its nuclear program in secret.
Ⅱ. 将下列文章译成汉语 (50分)
The Patent Clerk's Legacy
Albert Einstein looms over 20th-century physics as its defining, emblematic figure. His work altered forever the way we view the natural world. "Newton, please forgive me," Einstein begged as relativity theory wholly obliterated the absolutes of time and space that the reigning arbiter of all things physical had embraced more than two centuries earlier.
With little more to show than a rejected doctoral thesis from a few years before, this 26-year-old patent clerk, who practiced physics in his spare time and on the sly at work, declared brashly that the physicists of his day were "out of [their] depth" and went on to prove it. Besides special and general relativity, his work helped to launch quantum mechanics and modern statistical mechanics. Chemistry and biotechnology owe a debt to studies by Einstein that supplied evidence of the existence of molecules and the ways they behave.
What is even more amazing is that he purveyed many of these insights through a series of papers that appeared during a single miraculous year, 1905. No other comparably fertile period for individual scientific accomplishment can be found except during 1665 and 1666, when Isaac Newton, confined to his country home to escape the plague, started to lay the basis for the calculus, his law of gravitation and his theory of colors. The international physics community has set aside 2005 as the World Year of Physics as a tribute to Einstein's centennial.
Scientists in many realms of physics and engineering spent the 20th century testing, realizing and applying the ideas falling out of Einstein's work. As everybody knows, Einstein's E = mc2 formula was a key to the atomic bomb--and all the history that sprang from it. Einstein's explanation of the photoelectric effect underpinned technologies ranging from photodiodes to television camera tubes. A hundred years later technologists are still finding new ways to harvest novel inventions from Einstein's theories.
One mark of genius relates to the length of time needed to fully explore, through experimentation, the implications of a new theory. In that sense, Einstein is still going strong. A recently launched space probe will examine various predictions of general relativity. But physicists are not waiting until the answers are all in before asking what comes next. Much of the most exciting work in physics now has the more ambitious aim of going beyond Einstein--of transcending his ideas and achieving a task akin to the one to which he devoted the last 30 years of his life, right to his deathbed, without success.
Ⅲ.将下列短文译成英语(25分)
中国是一个发展中国家，也是一个负责任的国家。中国愿意为推进合作共赢、实现可持续发展做出自己的贡献。中国保持经济快速健康发展，对全球经济及地区经济发展有利。改革开放20多年来，中国经济年均增长9．4％，不仅成功解决了十几亿人的温饱问题，而且使中国人民的生活总体上达到小康水平。当前，中国经济发展总的形势很好。虽然经济运行中出现了一些问题，但在我们的宏观调控下，一些不健康、不稳定因素已经得到了有效抑制。
（责任编辑:Allen）
