2008年11月翻譯考試英語初級筆譯實務真題及答案

　　試題部分：

　　Section 1: English-Chinese Translation (英譯漢) (60 points)

　　Translate the following passage into Chinese. The time for this section is 120 minutes.

　　LONGYEARBYEN, Norway — With plant species disappearing at an alarming rate, scientists and governments are creating a global network of plant banks to store seeds and sprouts, precious genetic resources that may be needed for man to adapt the world’s food supply to climate change.

　　This week, the flagship of that effort, the Global Seed Vault near here, received its first seeds, millions of them. Bored into the middle of a frozen Arctic mountain topped with snow, the vault’s goal is to store and protect samples of every type of seed from every seed collection in the world.

　　As of Thursday, thousands of neatly stacked and labeled gray boxes of seeds — peas from Nigeria, corn from Mexico — reside in this glazed cavelike structure, forming a sort of backup hard drive, in case natural disasters or human errors erase the seeds from the outside world.

　　Descending almost 500 feet under the permafrost, the entrance tunnel to the seed vault is designed to withstand bomb blasts and earthquakes. An automated digital monitoring system controls temperature and provides security akin to a missile silo or Fort Knox. No one person has all the codes for entrance.

　　The Global Vault is part of a broader effort to gather and systematize information about plants and their genes, which climate change experts say may indeed prove more valuable than gold. In Leuven, Belgium, scientists are scouring the world for banana samples and preserving their shoots in liquid nitrogen before they become extinct. A similar effort is under way in France on coffee plants. A number of plants, most from the tropics, do not produce seeds that can be stored.

　　For years, a hodgepodge network of seed banks has been amassing seed and shoot collections in a haphazard manner. Labs in Mexico banked corn species. Those in Nigeria banked cassava. Now these scattershot efforts are being urgently consolidated and systematized, in part because of better technology to preserve plant genes and in part because of the rising alarm about climate change and its impact on world food production.

　　“We started thinking about this post-9/11 and on the heels of Hurricane Katrina,” said Cary Fowler, president of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, a nonprofit group that runs the vault. “Everyone was saying, why didn’t anyone prepare for a hurricane before? We knew it was going to happen.

　　“Well, we are losing biodiversity every day — it’s a kind of drip, drip, drip. It’s also inevitable. We need to do something about it.”

　　This week the urgency of the problem was underscored as wheat prices rose to record highs and wheat stores dropped to the lowest level in 35 years. A series of droughts and new diseases cut wheat production in many parts of the world. “The erosion of plants’ genetic resources is really going fast,” said Dr. Rony Swennen, head of the division of crop biotechnology at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, who has preserved half of the world’s 1,200 banana types. “We’re at a critical moment and if we don’t act fast, we’re going to lose a lot of plants that we may need.”

　　The United Nations International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources, ratified in 2004, created a formal global network for banking and sharing seeds, as well as for studying their genetic traits. Last year, its database received thousands of new seeds.

　　A system of plant banks could be crucial in responding to climate crises since it could identify genetic material and plant strains better able to cope with a changed environment.

　　Here at the Global Vault, hundreds of gray boxes containing seeds from places ranging from Syria to Mexico were moved this week into a freezing vault to be placed in suspended animation. They harbor a vast range of qualities, like the ability to withstand drier, warmer climate.

　　Section 2: Chinese-English Translation (漢譯英) (40 points)

　　Translate the following passage into English. The time for this section is 60 minutes.

　　在上海的現(xiàn)代化輕軌列車上，上班族有的在打手機，有的在用筆記本電腦，有的在觀賞車內(nèi)順平顯示器上播放的電影。全國各地，半導體工廠在昔日的農(nóng)田拔地而起，而在日益擴展的城市中，眾多大學校園和新公司林立的高科技園區(qū)正再現(xiàn)美國硅谷的模式。

　　中國擁有大量的技術(shù)人才。依靠這些人才，中國的高科技設計和開發(fā)能力正日益提高。

　　中國承擔了大批全球制造業(yè)務，生產(chǎn)電視機、電腦、移動電話和其他電子產(chǎn)品。同時，中國正計劃制造電腦芯片和網(wǎng)絡交換機等更復雜、更精密的高科技產(chǎn)品。

　　中國政府正致力于扶持信息技術(shù)產(chǎn)業(yè)，使之成為一大經(jīng)濟支柱，重點發(fā)展半導體和軟件工業(yè)，并對新公司采取提供價廉土地和稅收優(yōu)惠等激勵措施。

　　對外國投資者來說，中國的美麗在于其規(guī)模龐大、擴展迅速的國內(nèi)市場。另一個優(yōu)勢則是低工資，中國工程師的薪水僅是西方同行的十分之一。