小句子，大学问 | 2019年考研英语翻译真题第47题解析

今天是2018年最后一天，再过几个小时，我们就要进入2019年了。

在英语学习的道路上，我们依然要戒急戒躁、持续精进，炼就扎实的英语功底。

何谓英语功底？

我想大家从我下面的翻译解析中对此会有所领悟。这是我对刚刚过去的2019年考研翻译真题第47题的解析（点击图片看大图）。

下面是完整的文章内容

It was only after I started to write a weekly column about the medical journals, and began to read scientific papers from beginning to end, that I realised just how bad much of the medical literature frequently was. I came to recognise various signs of a bad paper: the kind of paper that purports to show that people who eat more than one kilo of broccoli a week were 1.17 times more likely than those who eat less to suffer late in life from pernicious anaemia. 46) There is a great deal of this kind of nonsense in the medical journals which, when taken up by broadcasters and the lay press, generates both health scares and short-lived dietary enthusiasms.

Why is so much bad science published? A recent paper, titled ‘The Natural Selection of Bad Science’, published on the Royal Society’s open science website, attempts to answer this intriguing and important question. It says the problem is not merely that people do bad science, as they have always done, but that our current system of career advancement positively encourages it. What is important is not truth, let alone importance, but publication, which has become almost an end in itself. There has been a kind of inflationary process at work: 47) nowadays anyone applying for a research post has to have published twice the number of papers that would have been required for the same post only 10 years ago. Never mind the quality, then, count the number. 

48) Attempts have been made to curb this tendency, for example, by trying to incorporate some measure of quality as well as quantity into the assessment of an applicant’s published papers. This is the famed citation index, that is to say the number of times a paper has been quoted elsewhere in the scientific literature, the assumption being that an important paper will be cited more often than one of small account. 49) This would be reasonable enough if it were not for the fact that scientists can easily arrange to cite themselves in their future publications, or get associates to do so for them in return for similar favours.

Boiling down an individual’s output to simple metrics, such as number of publications or journal impacts, entails considerable savings in time, energy and ambiguity. Unfortunately, the long-term costs of using simple quantitative metrics to assess researcher merit are likely to be quite great.

50) If we are serious about ensuring that our science is both meaningful and reproducible, we must ensure that our institutions incentivise that kind of science.

 以上这些考研翻译句子，有的看似简单，但真正用中文表达的时候，可能会有各种误读，大家不妨一试。有兴趣的同学，可以把其他四个划线的句子在留言中给出自己的译文，我到时都会详细讲解它们该如何翻译的。

仅以此文分享，作为新年问候！

恭祝大家新年心想事成，平安，喜乐🙏