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2012年11月英语二级《笔译实务》试题
Section 1: English-Chinese Translation（英译汉）
Part A Compulsory Translation（必译题）
SINGAPORE — For more than a decade, archaeologists and historians have been studying the contents of a ninth-century Arab dhow that was discovered in 1998 off Indonesia’s Belitung Island. The sea-cucumber divers who found the wreck had no idea it eventually would be considered one of the most important maritime discoveries of the late 20th century.
The dhow was carrying a rich cargo — 60,000 ceramic pieces and an array of gold and silver works — and its discovery has confirmed how significant trade was along a maritime silk road between Tang Dynasty China and Abbasid Iraq. It also has revealed how China was mass-producing trade goods even then and customizing them to suit the tastes of clients in West Asia.
“Shipwrecked: Tang Treasures and Monsoon Winds,” at the new, lotus-shaped Art Science Museum designed by Moshe Safdie, presents items from the Belitung wreck. Curated by the Asian Civilisations Museum here and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and Smithsonian Institution in Washington, the show is expected to travel to museums around the world over the next five to six years.
“This exhibition tells us a story about an extraordinary moment in globalization,” said Julian Raby, director of the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery. “It brings to life the tale of Sinbad sailing to China to make his fortune. It shows us that the world in the ninth century was not as fragmented as we assumed. There were two great export powers: the Tang in the east and the Abbasid based in Baghdad.”
Until the Belitung find, historians had thought that Tang China traded primarily through the land routes of Central Asia, mainly on the Silk Road. Ancient records told of Persian fleets sailing the Southeast Asian seas but no wrecks had been found, until the Belitung dhow. Its cargo confirmed that a huge volume of trade was taking place along a maritime route, said Heidi Tan, a curator at the Asian Civilisations Museum and a co-curator of the exhibition.
Mr. Raby said: “The size of the find gives us a sense of two things: a sense of China as a country already producing things on an industrialized scale and also a China that is no longer producing ceramics to bury.” He was referring to the production of burial pottery like camels and horses, which was banned in the late eighth century. “Instead, kilns looked for other markets and they started producing tableware and they built an export market.”
Part B Optional Translation（二选一题）
Topic 1 （选题一）
BRUSSELS — Madeira is more than 500 kilometers from the African coast and is officially one of the “outermost regions” of the European Union. Despite that far-flung status, Madeira catapulted into the center of the Union’s agricultural and environmental affairs last year when Portugal asked the European Commission for permission to impose an unprecedented ban on growing biotech crops there.
Last week, the commission quietly let the deadline pass for opposing Portugal’s request, allowing Madeira, which is one of Portugal’s autonomous regions, to become the first E.U. territory to get formal permission from Brussels to remain entirely free of genetically modified organisms.
Madeira now will probably go ahead and implement the ban, a spokeswoman for the Portuguese government said Friday.
Individual European countries and regions have banned certain genetically modified crops before. Many consumers and farmers in countries like Austria, France and Italy regard the crops as potentially dangerous and likely to contaminate organically produced food.
But the case of Madeira represents a significant landmark, because it is the first time the commission, which runs the day-to-day affairs of the European Union, has permitted a country to impose such a sweeping and definitive rejection of the technology.
The Madeirans’ main concerns focused on preserving the archipelago’s biodiversity and its forest of subtropical laurel trees.
Such forests, known as laurisilva, were once widespread on the European mainland but were wiped out thousands of years ago during an earlier period of climate change.
That has left Madeira with “much the largest extent of laurel forest surviving in the world, with a unique suite of plants and animals,” according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, which named the Madeiran laurisilva a World Heritage Site in 1999.
The forest also is a growing attraction for tourists, who make up a significant portion of Madeira’s earnings.
In seeking to ban biotechnology on Madeira, the Portuguese government told the commission that it would be impossible to separate crops containing genetically engineered material from other plant life.
The “risk to nature presented by the deliberate release of GMOs is so dangerous and poses such a threat to the environmental and ecological health of Madeira, that it is not worthwhile risking their use, either directly in the agricultural sector or even on an experimental basis,” the Portuguese told the commission, using the acronym for genetically modified organisms.
Topic 2（选题二）
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