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高翻翻译实践（英译汉和完型） The Short March 短行军 TIME MAGAZINE, Thursday, Feb. 14, 2008 时代周刊,2008年2月14日,星期四 By BILL POWELL/SHANGHAI 文.比尔 鲍威尔/上海 TIME Senior Writer Bill Powell, who moved to a town outside Shanghai in 2006, talks about joining the millions of Chinese who are building the country's booming suburbs 时代杂志职业作家，他将在文中与我们分享他2006年搬到上海郊区，成为推动郊区急速发展的数百万中国人之一的感想。 On a cold, gray afternoon a year ago, I stood on the deck of our newly purchased, half-constructed house about an hour outside Shanghai, wondering what, exactly, I had gotten myself into(into what?). My wife, a Shanghai native, and I had moved back to China from New York City in the spring of 2004, and 21?2 years later we had decided to take the plunge. We bought a three-story, five-bedroom townhouse way out in the suburbs, in a town called New Songjiang, a place that was then — and remains now — very much a work in progress. 一年前的一个寒冷阴暗的下午，我站在我们距离上海市区一小时车程的尚在建设中的新房的地板上，陷入了沉思。我的妻子是上海本地人，我在2004年春天离开纽约来到中国，两年半以后我们做了这个决定。我们在上海郊区一个叫新淞江的地方购置了一套三层五居室的别墅。新淞江当时——可以说直到现在——一直在飞速发展。 We had come here that day to see how construction was progressing. Our house, along with about 140 others, was going up in a development called Emerald Riverside. It sits on the banks of a tributary that dumps into the Huangpu, the river that cuts Shanghai in two about 28 miles (45 km) to the northeast. On that dreary afternoon I gazed out to the other side of the river, looking at the only significant patch of land for miles that was not yet being developed ——about five acres (20,000 sq m) of green that local farmers still used to grow watermelons, which they then sold to the migrant workers building this town. On the far bank there was a ramshackle one-room brick house, where three of the farmers lived — a husband, wife and teenage son. They had no running water — they bathed and washed their clothes in the river — and the place was lit by a single bulb. In every direction just beyond the watermelon patch, office parks and houses and apartment complexes were going up, forming a cordon around the farmland that was drawing inexorably tighter. As it is in vast swathes of China, the new was replacing the old, and it was not doing so slowly. It was doing so in the blink of an eye. 那天我们来这里是为了查看工程进度。我们的房子和翡翠河畔的其它约140套房子都在建设中。翡翠河畔坐落在黄埔江的一条支流上，黄埔江在这里的东北方向约28英里（48千米），它将上海分隔成两块。在这个沉闷的下午，我凝视着河对岸几里外唯一一块没有被开发的田地，大约5英亩（2000平方米），当地的农民在那里种西瓜，然后卖给在这里建设小镇的民工。在远处的河岸，有一间摇摇欲坠的砖头房子，里面有一只照明的电灯泡，那里住着三个农民——丈夫、妻子和十几岁的儿子。他们没有流动水，平时在河里洗澡洗衣服。在西瓜地的前面，四周政府停车场、写字楼和复合式公寓正在建造，像一条冷酷无情的绳索，紧紧地将这块农田包围住。事实上，在中国大部分地区，新事物都在取代着旧事物，并且不是缓慢地，而就像发生在眨眼之间。 I stood on the deck that day and watched one of the farmers who worked the watermelon patch, an older woman who would later introduce herself to us as Liu Yi, as she stared back at me across the river. I remember thinking to myself, My god, what must be going through her mind? Not only is the land she works on about to disappear, but there's this foreigner standing over there staring at her. Where did he come from and, more to the point, what in the world is he doing out here? The short answer is that my wife and I have become a tiny part of China's latest revolution. We got an off-the-shelf mortgage from the Standard Chartered Bank branch in town, plunked down 25% of the purchase price, and bought ourselves a piece of the Great Chinese Dream. 那天我站在楼上看着一位在西瓜田劳作的农民，就像她站在河对岸看着我一样，后来她向我们介绍说她叫刘姨。我记得我当时在想，天啊，她的脑海里在想些什么？不光她劳作的这块土地将要消失了，那里还站着一个外国人目不转睛地望着她。他是从哪里来的，更重要的是，他大老远地来到这儿究竟要做什么？简短的答案是我和我的妻子已经成为中国当前一大变革中的微小的一部分。我们从镇上的渣打银行支行办理了房屋抵押贷款，付了25%的首付，为我们自己买下了实现中国梦的一部分。 Best Years of Their Lives For the past decade and a half, the frantic pace of urbanization has been the transformative engine driving this country's economy, as some 300-400 million people from dirt-poor farming regions made their way to relative prosperity in cities. Within the contours of that great migration, however, there is another one(which one?) now about to take place— less visible, but arguably no less powerful. As China's major cities — there are now 49 with populations of one million or more, compared with nine in the U.S. in 2000 — become more crowded and more expensive, a phenomenon similar to the one that reshaped the U.S. in the aftermath of World War II has begun to take hold. That is the inevitable desire among a rapidly expanding middle class for a little bit more room to live, at a reasonable price; maybe a little patch of grass for children to play on, or a whiff of cleaner air as the country's cities become ever more polluted. 生命中最美好的年代 在过去的十五年里，疯狂的城市化进程已经成为带动这个国家经济的火车头，三、四千万人从又穷又脏的农业地区来到了相对繁荣的城市。Within the contours of that great migration, however, there is another one(which one?) now about to take place— less visible, but arguably no less powerful.因为中国的大城市——现在中国有49个百万人口的大城市，而在2000年的美国只有9个——变得越来越拥护，生活成本越来越高，这种现象就像是美国二战后的情形再现。因此，迅速增长的中产阶级希望拥有价格合理的大房子，拥有一块可以供孩子玩耍的草坪，在城市日益被污染的情况下能够呼吸到清新的空气，这就成为了必然的欲望。 This is China's Short March. A wave of those who are newly affluent and firm in the belief that their best days, economically speaking, are ahead of them, is headed for the suburbs. In Shanghai alone, urban planners believe some 5 million people will move to what are called "satellite cities" in the next 10 years. To varying degrees, the same thing is happening all across China. This process — China's own suburban flight — is at the core of the next phase of this country's development, and will be for years to come. 这是中国的一次短行军。我们应该向那些引领郊区发展的新富致意，他们坚信从经济上来说，更美好的前景就在眼前。单就上海来说，城市规划人员相信在未来的10年里，将有5百万人迁移到“卫星城”。这样的变化发生在中国的每个城市。这一进程——中国的郊区飞跃——不久将成为这个国家下一阶段发展的核心。 The consequences of this suburbanization are enormous. Think of how the U.S. was transformed, economically and socially, in the years after World War II, when GIs returned home and formed families that then fanned out to the suburbs. The comparison is not exact, of course, but it's compelling enough. The effects of China's suburbanization are just beginning to ripple across Chinese society and the global economy. It's easy to understand the persistent strength in commodity prices — steel, copper, lumber, oil — when you realize that in Emerald Riverside construction crews used more than three tons of steel in the houses and nearly a quarter of a ton of copper wiring. There are 35 housing developments either just finished or still under construction in New Songjiang alone, a town in which 500,000 people will eventually live. And as Lu Hongjiang, a vice president of the New Songjiang Development & Construction company puts it, "we're only at the very beginning of this in China." 郊区化所带来的影响是巨大的。 想想美国二战后，美国大兵回国后组建了自己的家庭开始向郊区发展后，美国在经济和社会上的转变。这个比喻也许并不十分准确，但足以说明问题。中国的郊区化进程已经开始影响到中国社会和全球经济。如果你知道翡翠河畔的每栋房子要用掉至少三吨钢，和四分之一吨铜线后，就很容易理解当前日用品价格上涨的势头为何如此强劲了——钢铁、铜、木材、石油。单是新淞江就有35个建成和在建的小区，整个镇上最终将会有50万人居住。正如新淞江建筑发展公司副总Lu Hongjiang所言“我们所做的在中国只是开了先河。” |
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