2019年CATTI三级笔译实务练习题：经济大萧条英译汉Effect of the Great Depression1It is difficult to measure the human cost2 ofthe Great Depression. The material hardships were bad enough. Men and women lived in lean-tos made of scrap wood and metal, and families went without meat and fresh vegetables for months, existing on a diet of soup and beans. 3 The psychological burden was even greater4: Americans suffered through year after year of grinding poverty with no letup in sight5. The unemployed stood in line for hours waiting for relief checks, veterans sold apples or pencils on street corners, their manhood - once prized so highly by the nation - now in question6. People left the city for the countryside but found no salvation on the farm. Crops rotted in the fields because prices were too low to make harvesting worthwhile7; sheriffs fended off angry crowds as banks foreclosed long overdue mortgages on once prosperous farms8.Few escaped the suffering. African Americans who had left the poverty of the rural South for factory jobs in the North were among the first to be laid off. Mexican Americans, who had flowed in to replace European immigrants, met with competition from angry citizens, now willing to do stoop labor in the fields and work as track layers on the railroads9. Immigration officials used technicalities10to halt the flow across the Rio Grande11 and even to reverse it; nearly a half million Mexicans were deported in the 1930s, including families with children born in the United States.The poor black, brown, and white - survived because they knew better than most Americans how to exist in poverty. They stayed in bed in cold weather, both to keep warm and to avoid unnecessary burning up of calories12; they patched their shoes with pieces of rubber from discarded tires13 , heated only the kitchens of their homes, and ate scraps of food that others would reject.The middle class, which had always lived with high expectations, was hit hard. Professionals and white-collar workers refused to ask for charity even while their families went without food; one New York dentist and his wife turned on the gas and left a note saying, We want to get out of the way before we are forced to accept relief money. 14 People who fell behind in their mortgage payments lost their homes and then faced eviction when they could not pay the rent.Health care declined. 15 Middle-class people stopped going to doctors and dentists regularly, unable to make the required cash payment in advance for services rendered. 16 Even the well-to-do were affected, giving up many of their former luxuries and weighed down with guilt as they watched former friends and businessassociates join the ranks of the impoverished.17 My father lost everything in the Depression became an all-too-familiar refrained among young people who dropped out of college.Many Americans sought escape19 in movement. Men, boys, and some women, rode the rails in search of jobs, hopping freights to move south in the winter or west in the summer. On the Missouri Pacific alone, the number of vagrants increased from just over 13,000 in 1929 to nearly 200,000 in 1931. One town in the Southwest hired special policemen to keep vagrants from leaving the boxcars. Those who became tramps had to keep on the move, but they did find a sense of community in the hobo jungles20 that sprang up along the major railroad routes. Here a man could find a place to eat and sleep, and people with whom to share his misery. Louis Banks, a black veteran, told interviewer Studs Terkel what these informal camps were like:Black and white, it didn’t make any difference who you were.Because everybody was poor. All friendly, sleep in a jungle. We used to take a big pot and cook food, cabbage, meat and beans all together. We all set together, we made a tent. Twenty five or thirty would be out on the side of the rail, white and colored: They didn’t have no mothers or sisters, they didn’t have no home, they were dirty, they had overalls on, they didn’t have no food, they didn’t haveanything. 21词汇1.lean-to单坡屋顶，披屋，披棚2.grinding poverty难于忍受的贫困，极度贫困3.letup(口语)停止，放松，减弱4.Foreclose预先处理，预先了结;取消赎取抵押品之权利5.overdue过期未付6.stoop labor(收割蔬菜或采摘矮果实等时的)弯腰劳动;弯腰作业7.the Rio Grande格兰德河8.deport驱逐出境9.fall behind落在后面，拖欠10.weigh (sb.)down (with...)(因而)闷闷不乐，使人心情沉重、沮丧、烦恼等11.refrain老调，一再重复的话12.boxcar(铁路上用的)货车车厢，棚车13.hobo流浪汉，游民，流动工人14.hobo jungle(流浪汉、游民的)露营地，(大萧条时期的)失业工人集结地注释1.Great Depression:大萧条，指1929年到1939年发生在美国和其他国家的经济衰退，影响深远，损失惨重，据估计，大萧条时间，世界的经济损失达2500亿美元。