2. 外语
  3. Most interpreters agree that their really unsettling moments come when the speaker makes a joke involving an untranslatable-play

Most interpreters agree that their really unsettling moments come when the speaker makes a joke involving an untranslatable-play

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问题    Most interpreters agree that their really unsettling moments come when the speaker makes a joke involving an untranslatable-play on words.  "There is hardly anything people are more sensitive about than the jokes .they tell," Miss Seleskovitch says, "and it is very uncomfortable for everyone when the speaker is overcome with laughter at his own humour and everyone stares at him blankly."
   In an extreme instance, she once solved this problem by quietly informing the delegates, "The speaker has just made a pun which cannot be translated. Please laugh. It would please him very much." To her enormous relief, they did.
   Not every contretemps ends so happily. Victore Sukhodrev was constantly tested by Khrushchev’s earthy style. His personal Waterloo came when his chief, finally realising that his expressions were being diplomatically tiding up, insisted, "I didn’t say riffraff. I said bastards."
   It was not until the turn of the century that the interpreting art came into its own. Previously, exchanges between nations were conducted by career diplomats, usually in secret and almost always in French. With the end of World War I, heads of state and heads of government met face to face at the peace conference in Versailles-and discovered they could communicate only with great difficulty. Conferences that should have ended in hours dragged on for days.
   The League of Nations, abandoning secret diplomacy, opened a new era in international affairs; but it was as though the burden of language had been incorporated into the League charter. A delegate rose to speak in French. An interpreter took notes, When the delegate finished, the interpreter rose to repeat what had been said, this time in English. A one-hour speech that might have been merely tedious became a crashing bore when it took two, and those who said the League eventually talked itself to death had at least a point.
   Simultaneous translation changed all that, and the relatively simple equipment that makes it possible is routinely used in 85% of all international meetings today. The speaker talks into a microphone linked to a sound-proof booth just off the assembly floor. There the interpreter, speaking into a second microphone, translates the speech for the benefit of those who don’t understand the original language, all of whom wear an ear-piece no bigger than a hearing aid. If the audience is multi-lingual, all that is needed to keep everyone abreast isan interpreter for each language, and additional booths and transmitting channels with the corresponding selection dials at each listener’s post.
   Inside the little booth, however, the atmosphere is invariably charged with tension, and the stress is usually most severe in the German booth. Since the verb comes last in a German sentence, there is no way of anticipating what a speaker will say. If the sentence is long and involved, there is no chance of understanding it until many nerve-racking minutes have passed.
   There are those who believe that the age-old problem of how best to translate the thoughts of men from one language to another will yield to the magic of the electronic age. In 1996, the US National Research Council published its findings on the proficiency of a translating machine that took ten years to build and cost＄8 million. It was, said the report, 21%slower than a skilled human.
   Man v. s. Computer. When it comes to translating subtleties, the machine itself best emphasizes why the gifted professionals are in no danger of being replaced. In a demonstration once, the designers asked a statesman to feed the machine a phrase  any phrase. The statesman chose, "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak." In went the words in English to the accompaniment of blinking lights and whirrings, and out came a slip of paper in French. "The vodka is strong," it said, "but the meat is rotten."
   Winston Churchill once said: "Jaw jaw is better than war war ." Only the anonymous little fraternity of conference interpreters, the real catalysts of international communication, makes this kind of jawing possible, and the world is just a little bit safer for them.
According to the passage, all of the following statements are true EXCEPT______.
选项 A、before World War I, the diplomat language was French rather than English
B、simultaneous translation is a demanding job
C、German is more difficult than English
D、interpreters have played a role in preventing breakout of war
答案C
解析 第四段第二句提到口译出现时的外交语言几乎总是法语，因此A属实。第七段第一句提到同声传译室里的紧张气氛以及翻译者的压力，由此可见同声传译费心费力 (demanding)，B也属实。文章最后一段首先提到邱吉尔的名言“说理胜过打仗”，然后指出只有那些口译人员才使说理成为可能，世界也因为他们而变得安全些，所以D也正确。C不正确，因为第七段只提到德语句式结构给同声传译人员在翻译时带来巨大压力，但并没说德语比英语难。
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