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.
Miss Seleskovitch’s case shows that an interpreter needs to______.
选项 A、have a sense of humour
B、be quick-witted
C、have a good command of a foreign language
D、be able to play on words
答案B
解析 本文第一段指出，“玩弄字眼”的笑话是无法翻译的。接着第二段讲到Miss Seleskovitch遇到这种情况时，她机智镇定地提醒听众：发言人刚刚用双关语讲了一个无法翻译的笑话，请大家笑一笑，这会让他高兴。听众果真配合了她。因此可见口译有时需要机智，因此正确答案是B。
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