「真题」2019年6月CATTI二级笔译实务英译汉
English-Chinese Translation
Translate the following two passages into English.
Passage 1
In 2009, Time magazine hailed School of One, an online math program piloted at three New York City public schools, as one of the year’s 50 best innovations. Each day, School of One software generated individualized math “playlists” for students who then chose the “modality” in which they wished to learn — software, a virtual teacher or a flesh-and-blood one. A different algorithm sorted teachers’ specialties and schedules to match a student’s needs. “It generates the lessons, the tests and it grades the tests,” one veteran instructor marveled. It saved salaries, too, thereby “teacher proofing” (as policy wonks say) education in a few clicks.
Although School of One made only modest improvements in students’ math scores and was adopted by only a handful of New York schools (not the 50 for which it was slated), it serves as a notable example of a pattern that Andrea Gabor, who holds the Bloomberg chair of business journalism at Baruch College/CUNY, charts in “After the Education Wars.” For more than three decades, an unlikely coalition of corporate philanthropists, educational technology entrepreneurs and public education bureaucrats has spearheaded a brand of school reform characterized by the overvaluing of technology and standardized testing and a devaluing of teachers and communities.
The trend can be traced back to a hyperbolic 1983 report, “A Nation at Risk,” issued by President Ronald Reagan’s National Commission on Excellence in Education. Against the backdrop of an ascendant Japanese economy and consistent with President Reagan’s disdain for public education (and teachers’ unions), “A Nation at Risk” blamed America’s ineffectual schools for a “rising tide of mediocrity” that was diminishing America’s global role in a new high-tech world.
Policymakers turned their focus to public education as a matter of national security, one too important (and potentially too profitable) to entrust to educators. The notion that top-down decisions by politicians, not teachers, should determine what children need was a thread running through the bipartisan 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, the Obama administration’s Race to the Top and state-initiated Common Core standards, and the current charter-driven agenda of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. “Accountability” became synonymous with standardized tests, resulting in a testing juggernaut with large profits going to commercial publishing giants like Pearson.
The education wars have been demoralizing for teachers, over 17 percent of whom drop out within their first five years. No one believes that teaching to the test is good pedagogy, but what are the options when students’ future educational choices, teachers’ salaries and retention and, in some states, the fate of entire schools rest on student test scores?
In meticulous if sometimes too laborious detail, Gabor documents reform’s institutional failings. She describes the sorry turns in New York City’s testing-obsessed policies, the undermining of Michigan’s once fine public schools (spurred in part by constant pressure from the DeVos family) and the heartbreaking failure of New Orleans to remake its schools after Hurricane Katrina. The largely white city establishment bypassed the majority-black community, inviting philanthropists and the federal government to rebuild its public schools as the nation’s first citywide, all-charter system. A dozen years later, more than a third of the city’s charter schools have failed.
Passage 2
Angkor is one of the most important archaeological sites in South-East Asia. For several centuries Angkor, was the centre of the Khmer Kingdom. With impressive monuments, several different ancient urban plans and large water reservoirs, the site is a unique concentration of features testifying to an exceptional civilization. The architecture and layout of the successive capitals bear witness to a high level of social order and ranking within the Khmer Empire. Angkor is therefore a major site exemplifying cultural, religious and symbolic values, as well as containing high architectural, archaeological and artistic significance.
The park is inhabited, and many villages, some of whom the ancestors are dating back to the Angkor period are scattered throughout the park. The Angkor complex encompasses all major architectural buildings and hydrological engineering systems from the Khmer period and most of these “barays” and canals still exist today. All the individual aspects illustrate the intactness of the site very much reflecting the splendor of the cities that once were. The site integrity however, is put under dual pressures: Endogenous: exerted by more than 100,000 inhabitants distributed over 112 historic settlements scattered over the site, who constantly try to expand their dwelling areas; exogenous: related to the proximity of the town of Siem Reap, the seat of the province and a tourism hub.
Angkor is one of the largest archaeological sites in operation in the world. Tourism represents an enormous economic potential but it can also generate irreparable destructions of the tangible as well as intangible cultural heritage. Many research projects have been undertaken, since the international safeguarding program was first launched in 1993.The scientific objectives of the research (e.g. anthropological studies on socio-economic conditions) result in a better knowledge and understanding of the history of the site, and its inhabitants that constitute a rich exceptional legacy of the intangible heritage. The purpose is to associate the “intangible culture” to the enhancement of the monuments in order to sensitize the local population to the importance and necessity of its protection and preservation and assist in the development of the site as Angkor is a living heritage site where Khmer people in general, but especially the local population, are known to be particularly conservative with respect to ancestral traditions and where they adhere to a great number of archaic cultural practices that have disappeared elsewhere. Moreover, the Angkor Archaeological Park is very rich in medicinal plants, used by the local population for treatment of diseases. The plants are prepared and then brought to different temple sites for blessing by the gods. The Preah Khan temple is considered to have been a university of medicine and the NeakPoan an ancient hospital.
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