2013年11月英语二级《笔译实务》试题Part A Compulsory Translation（必译题）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, thesheep 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.Part B Optional Translation（二选一题）Topic 1 （选题一）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 itselegant 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.201211 Passage 1Tucked away in this small village in Buckinghamshire County is the former Elizabethan coaching inn where William Shakespeare is said to have penned part of "A Midsummer Night's Dream."Dating from 1534, the inn, now called Shakespeare House, is thought to have been built as a Tudor hunting lodge. Later it became a stop for travelers between London and Stratford-upon-Avon, where Shakespeare was born and buried.It was "Brief Lives," a 17th-century collection of biographies by John Aubrey, that linked Shakespeare to the inn, saying that he had stayed there and drawn inspiration for the comedy while in the village.One of the current owners, Nick Underwood, said the local lore goes even further: "It is also said he appears at the oriel window on the top floor of the house on April 23 every year -- the date he is said to have been born and to have died.""In later years, the house later became a farmhouse, with 150 acres of land, but, over time, pieces were sold off," Mr. Underwood said. "In the 20th century, it was owned by two American families." Now, he and his co-owner, Roy Elsbury, have put the seven-bedroom property on the market at ￡1.375 million, or $2.13 million. Despite its varied uses and renovations over the years, the 4,250-square-foot, or 395-square-meter, inn has retained so much of its original character that the organization English Heritage lists it as a Grade II* property, indicating that it is particularly important and of "more than special interest." Only 27 percent of the 1,600 buildings on the organization's register have this designation.We knew of the house before we bought it and were very excited when it came up for sale. It is so unusual to find an Elizabethan property of this size, in this area, and when we saw it, we absolutely fell in love with it," Mr. Underwood said. "We have taken great pleasure in working on it and living here. This house is all about the history."In addition to being the owners' home, the property currently is run as a luxury guest house, with rooms rented for ₤99 to ₤250 a night."Shakespeare House is a wonderful example of Elizabethan architecture," said DeanHeaviside, the national sales director of Fine real estate agency, which is representing the owners. "It has been beautif-ully restored and offers a unique lifestyle, which brings a taste of the past together with modern-day comfort. It is rare to find a home like this on the market."Passage 2The ancient frozen dome cloaking Greenland is so vast that pilots have crashed into what they thought was a cloud bank spanning the horizon. Flying over it, you can scarcely imagine that it could erode fast enough to dangerously raise sea levels any time soon.Along the flanks in spring and summer, however, the picture is very different. For an increasing number of warm years, a network of blue lakes and rivulets of melt-water has been spreading ever higher on the icecap.The melting surface darkens, absorbing up to four times as much energy from the sun as snow, which reflects sunlight. Natural drainpipes called moulins carry water from the surface into the depths, in some places reaching bedrock.The process slightly, but measurably, lubricates and accelerates the grinding passage of ice towards the sea.Most important, many glaciologists say, is the break-up of huge semi-submerged clots of ice where some large Greenland glaciers, particularly along the west coast, squeeze through fiords as they meet the warming ocean. As these passages have cleared, this has sharply accelerated the flow of many of these creeping, corrugated and frozen rivers.Some glaciologists fear that the rise in seas in a warming world could be much greater than the upper estimate of about 60 centimetres this century made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last year. (Seas rose less than 30 centimetres last century.)The panel's assessment did not include factors known to contribute to ice flows but not understood well enough to estimate with confidence. SCIENTIFIC scramble is under way to clarify whether the erosion of the world's most vulnerable ice sheets, in Greenland and west Antarctica, can continue to accelerate. The effort involves fieldand satellite analyses and sifting for clues from past warm periods,Things are definitely far more serious than anyone would have thought five years ago. Passage 1中国是一个发展中国家。