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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

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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.
【F1】
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答案如果真道歉的话，那么那些遭贬抑的金融界巨头将结成友好的联盟；形式化的道歉在过去几年里很是盛行，但都毫无意义。
解析 本句结构清晰，分号前后有两个并列分句。翻译时需要注意的是，前一个分句中的ifso是一个省略了谓语动词的条件状语从句，翻译时需要把谓语动词补译出来，以使意思表达完整。其次，后一个分句中institutional可以根据上下文灵活译成“形式化的”，此外，后一句话其实隐含着“道歉虽然很多，但其实都没有什么意义”的含义，可以补译出来。
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