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  3. Does Wall Street owe the people of America an apology? That was Senator Sherrod Brown’s suggestion to Ben Bernanke and Hank Paul

Does Wall Street owe the people of America an apology? That was Senator Sherrod Brown’s suggestion to Ben Bernanke and Hank Paul

admin2015-03-25  76
问题     Does Wall Street owe the people of America an apology? That was Senator Sherrod Brown’s suggestion to Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson during a Senate hearing last week.【F1】lf so, the humbled titans of finance will be in good company; institutional apologies have mushroomed in past years. British Christians, for example, have expressed public contrition for slavery and have even considered apologizing for skepticism about evolution. Nicolaus Mills, an American commentator, calls the fashion for saying sorry a "global culture of apology". That may be an overstatement; public kowtows are still rare compared with the manifold wrongs of the past. The bigger question is what, if anything, they mean.
    Apologies for past wrongs by present-day institutions are trickier still. Jonathan Sumption, a London lawyer and historian, calls them "a vulgar anachronism"—in effect, he says, "a rebuke to the past for not being more like the present".【F2】Trading apologies and forgiveness on behalf of dead people sounds unauthentic—especially when the issue is centuries old(such as Viking rape and pillage in Ireland, which Denmark’s culture minister Brian Mikkelson mourned in 2007). Collective guilt is an odd idea even in the present. Yet at a minimum, owning up to what happened in the past, and learning lessons from it, should benefit everyone.
    【F3】Successful apologies are usually a tactic of international or national politics, particularly when a new leader wants to distance himself from past mistakes. Italy has just apologized to Libya and paid reparations for colonialism(in exchange for energy deals and co-operation on migration). America’s ex-president Bill Clinton and Britain’s former prime minister, Tony Blair, were skilled in the theatre of public contrition on issues such as slavery. South Africa’s president F. W. de Klerk apologized for apartheid in 1992; Nelson Mandela then apologized for atrocities committed by the African National Congress. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission recorded individuals’ suffering and gave perpetrators a chance to confess and say sorry.
    So what makes a public apology successful? Melissa Nobles, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who specializes in apologology, says that they can give official backing to a particular view of history, help contain political grievances peacefully and encourage public-spiritedness among alienated parts of the population.
    But apologies don’t come free.【F4】They raise the annoyed question of compensating; not just money, but the promise of different legal treatment, including the right to sue for compensation. Canada has recompensed indigenous children removed from their homes; so has the state government of Tasmania. America and Canada have compensated ethnic Japanese citizens interned during the second world war.
    Still, fear of the legal consequences of saying sorry may be overblown.【F5】Mr. Rudd’s apology explicitly stated that it would have no legal import; a landmark court case confirmed that previous apologies by Australian states were protected by parliamentary privilege. America’s apology for slavery was a cashless one.
【F5】
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答案陆克文先生的道歉清楚地表明，道歉不会带来法律后果；这是一个具有里程碑意义的例证，从而证实，澳大利亚之前的道歉受到了议会特权的保护。
解析 本句整体结构是分号前后各一个并列分句。前一个分句由主句加一个宾语从句构成，可以按照原文语序直译；翻译的难点在于后一个分句，a landmark court case其实是对前一句的一个评价，却又是后一句的主语，为了前后的衔接，可以把a landmark court case单独译成一句话；其次，后一个分句是一个主句加宾语从句的结构，不过这个宾语从句是一个被动句，翻译时可以把谓语动词翻译成“受到……”的句式。
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