中国翻译工作者协会《中国翻译》编辑部暨中南大学外国语学院联合举办
第十七届“韩素音青年翻译奖”竞赛

中国专家翻译网摘编

　　随着全球化进程的加速、我国加入世界贸易组织、北京申办2008年奥运会以及上海申办 2010 年世博会的成功，中外交流日趋频繁。翻译，作为沟通中外交流的桥梁，将会发挥越来越重要的作用和影响。值此之际，中国译协《中国翻译》编辑部和中南大学外国语学院将联合举办第十七届“韩素音青年翻译奖”大赛，参赛原文见本期，具体参赛规则如下：

　　一、本届竞赛分别设立汉英和英译汉两个奖项，参赛者可任选一项或同时参加两项竞赛。

　　二、《中国翻译》2005年第一期刊登参赛原文、参赛规则和参赛券 。注：复印件有效) 。

　　三、参赛者年龄规定：44岁以下，即1967年7月1日以后出生 。

　　四、参赛译文必须独立完成，杜绝抄袭现象，一经发现，将取消参赛资格。

　　五、参赛译文请用电脑打印或用稿纸(注：有单位名称抬头的译文稿纸无效)书写清楚。译文前加一封面，将填好的参赛券剪贴在此封面上(请勿贴在信封上) 。译文正文内请勿书写译者姓名、地址、电话等个人信息，参赛译文内如涉及任何参赛者信息将被视为无效译文。

　　六、参赛截止日期：请参赛者于2005年5月30日以前 ( 以寄出日邮戳为准 ) 将参赛译文挂号寄至：北京市阜外百万庄大街 24 号《中国翻译》编辑部，邮编： 100037 。请在信封上注明：“参赛译文”字样，中南大学外国语学院不接收参赛译文。

　　七、参赛者在交寄参赛译文的同时，寄报名费 40 元，如果同时参加两项竞赛，请交报名费 80 元。汇款地址：北京市阜外百万庄大街 24 号《中国翻译》编辑部，邮编：100037，请在汇款单附言上注明“参赛报名费”字样。未交报名费的参赛译文无效。

　　八、为鼓励更多的英语爱好者参与大赛，学习翻译，提高翻译水平。本届竞赛将根据参赛者的数量适当加大获奖者的比例，设一、二、三等奖和优秀奖若干名，授予一、二、三等奖获得者证书、奖金和奖品，授予优秀奖获得者证书和奖品。2005年第6期( 11月15日出版)《中国翻译》杂志将公布竞赛结果。

　　九、联系地址：北京市阜外百万庄大街 24 号《中国翻译》编辑部 　邮编： 100037

　　　　电话：010-68327209，68995956，传真：010-68326681

　　　　电子信箱： ctjtac@public.bta.net.cn

　　第十七届“韩素音青年翻译奖”评审委员会

　　2005年1月

　　第十七届“韩素音青年翻译奖”参赛原文

汉译英部分：

老来乐

　　六十整岁望七十岁如攀高山。不料七十岁居然过了。又想八十岁是难于上青天，可望而不可即了。岂知八十岁又过了。老汉今年已八十二岁。这是照传统算法，务虚不务实。现在不是提倡尊重传统吗？

　　老年多半能悟道。孔子说“天下有道”。老子说“道可道”。《圣经》说“太初有道”。佛教说“邪魔外道”。我老了，不免胡思乱想，胡说八道，自觉悟出一条真理：老年是广阔天地，是可以大有作为的。

　　七十岁开始可以不做任何事而拿退休金，不愁没有一碗饭吃，自由自在，自得其乐。要看书可以随便乱翻。金庸、克里斯蒂、梁羽生、松本清张等等。从前哪能拜读？现在可以了。随看随忘，便扔在一边。无忧无虑，无人打扰，不必出门而自有天地。真是无限风光在老年。

　　偶尔有人来，不论男女老少认识不认识，天南地北，谈天说地，天文地理，天上地下，百无禁忌。我的话匣子一开，激光磁盘便响个不停，滔滔不绝。无奈我闲人忙，听众逐渐稀少，终于门庭冷落，只剩一屋子广阔天地，任我独往独来，随意挥洒。

　　打开电视，又是另一番新景象。古今中外，赤道南极，变幻莫测。真能坐地日行八万里。忽而庄严说教，忽而高歌一曲，忽而插科打诨，忽而舞步翩翩。帝王将相，牛鬼蛇神，无不具备，应有尽有，场面各有不同。主持人个个精神焕发。服装表演件件花样翻新。足球射门中的。篮球投篮不空。马家军飒爽英姿。大歌星真人假唱。忽然出现红顶花翎，拖着辫子，仿佛我的140岁的老父亲复活。并不辞辛苦跑到北京来对宣统皇帝磕头。我却曾在大庭广众中对溥仪先生点头问好。真是一代不如一代，一代胜过一代。正在注注自得时，不料长袍马褂已变成西装革履。长发长袜，飘来跳去，三点泳装耀眼生辉。眼睛耳朵实在招架不住，就干脆关掉电视，闭目养神去也。

　　这正是： 小屋之中天地阔 　老年无事是忙人

英译汉部分：

Beauty (excerpt)

Judging from the scientists I know, including Eva and Ruth, and those whom I've read about, you can't pursue the laws of nature very long without bumping into beauty.“I don't know if it's the same beauty you see in the sunset,”a friend tells me,“but it feels the same.”This friend is a physicist, who has spent a long career deciphering what must be happening in the interior of stars. He recalls for me this thrill on grasping for the first time Dirac's equations describing quantum mechanics, or those of Einstein describing relativity.“They're so beautiful,” he says,“you can see immediately they have to be true. Or at least on the way toward truth.”I ask him what makes a theory beautiful, and he replies,“Simplicity, symmetry, elegance, and power.”

Why nature should conform to theories we find beautiful is far from obvious. The most incomprehensible thing about the universe, as Einstein said, is that it's comprehensible. How unlikely, that a short-lived biped on a two-bit planet should be able to gauge the speed of light, lay bare the structure of an atom, or calculate the gravitational tug of a black hole. We're a long way from understanding everything, but we do understand a great deal about how nature behaves. Generation after generation, we puzzle out formulas, test them, and find, to an astonishing degree, that nature agrees. An architect draws designs on flimsy paper, and her buildings stand up through earthquakes. We launch a satellite into orbit and use it to bounce messages from continent to continent. The machine on which I write these words embodies hundreds of insights into the workings of the material world, insights that are confirmed by every burst of letters on the screen, and I stare at that screen through lenses that obey the laws of optics first worked out in detail by Isaac Newton.

By discerning patterns in the universe, Newton believed, he was tracing the hand of God. Scientists in our day have largely abandoned the notion of a Creator as an unnecessary hypothesis, or at least an untestable one. While they share Newton's faith that the universe is ruled everywhere by a coherent set of rules, they cannot say, as scientists, how these particular rules came to govern things. You can do science without believing in a divine Legislator, but not without believing in laws.

I spent my teenage years scrambling up the mountain of mathematics. Midway up the slope, however, I staggered to a halt, gasping in the rarefied air, well before I reached the heights where the equations of Einstein and Dirac would have made sense. Nowadays I add, subtract, multiply, and do long division when no calculator is handy, and I can do algebra and geometry and even trigonometry in a pinch, but that is about all that I've kept from the language of numbers. Still, I remember glimpsing patterns in mathematics that seemed as bold and beautiful as a skyful of stars.

I'm never more aware of the limitations of language than when I try to describe beauty. Language can create its own loveliness, of course, but it cannot deliver to us the radiance we apprehend in the world, any more than a photograph can capture the stunning swiftness of a hawk or the withering power of a supernova. Eva's wedding album holds only a faint glimmer of the wedding itself. All that pictures or words can do is gesture beyond themselves toward the fleeting glory that stirs our hearts. So I keep gesturing.

“ All nature is meant to make us think of paradise,”Thomas Merton observed. Because the Creation puts on a nonstop show, beauty is free and inexhaustible, but we need training in order to perceive more than the most obvious kinds. Even 15 billion years or so after the Big Bang, echoes of that event still linger in the form of background radiation, only a few degrees above absolute zero. Just so, I believe, the experience of beauty is an echo of the order and power that permeate the universe. To measure background radiation, we need subtle instruments; to measure beauty, we need alert intelligence and our five keen senses.

Anyone with eyes can take delight in a face or a flower. You need training, however, to perceive the beauty in mathematics or physics or chess, in the architecture of a tree, the design of a bird's wing, or the shiver of breath through a flute. For most of human history, the training has come from elders who taught the young how to pay attention. By paying attention, we learn to savor all sorts of patterns, from quantum mechanics to patchwork quilts. This predilection brings with it a clear evolutionary advantage, for the ability to recognize patterns helped our ancestors to select mates, find food, avoid predators. But the same advantage would apply to all species, and yet we alone compose symphonies and crossword puzzles, carve stone into statues, map time and space.

Have we merely carried our animal need for shrewd perceptions to an absurd extreme? Or have we stumbled onto a deep congruence between the structure of our minds and the structure of the universe?

I am persuaded the latter is true. I am convinced there's more to beauty than biology, more than cultural convention. It flows around and through us in such abundance, and in such myriad forms, as to exceed by a wide margin any mere evolutionary need. Which is not to say that beauty has nothing to do with survival: I think it has everything to do with survival. Beauty feeds us from the same source that created us. It reminds us of the shaping power that reaches through the flower stem and through our own hands. It restores our faith in the generosity of nature. By giving us a taste of the kinship between our own small minds and the great Mind of the Cosmos, beauty reassures us that we are exactly and wonderfully made for life on this glorious planet, in this magnificent universe. I find in that affinity a profound source of meaning and hope. A universe so prodigal of beauty may actually need us to notice and respond, may need our sharp eyes and brimming hearts and teeming minds, in order to close the circuit of Creation.

参赛券，请沿虚线剪下，贴在译文前加的封面上）。

注：参赛券复印有效

－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－