第二十五天：英譯漢模擬練習

今天的結束語是：Translators are traitors（意大利諺語：翻譯即叛徒）。老子言：“信言不美，美言不信”。翻譯，難！得分，不是太難！

Directions:

Read the following text carefully and then translate the underlined segments into Chinese. Your translation should be written neatly on ANSWER SHEET 2. (10 points)

A pair of twins is born, and both infants begin to develop normally. By their first birthday, however, the male sibling has begun to diverge from his sister, showing less eye contact and affection. He often wears a spacedout expression and fixates on certain puzzles and patterns. (46) By age three, his mounting symptoms lead to a diagnosis that has become disturbingly routine in recent years: autism.

What causes the disease, which now strikes 1 in every 166 children, and why does it affect four times as many boys as girls? Geneticists at the University of California at Los Angeles are closing in on the answers. This spring they announced that they had pinned down the likely location of an autism gene on chromosome 17. The evidence was found only in families with autistic males, indicating a hereditary basis for the disease’s gender bias. (47) Reporting the discovery in the American Journal of Human Genetics, the scientists will next try to find the actual gene among the 50 or so clustered nearby, a painstaking process that could take another year. “If we’re lucky,” says coauthor Rita Cantor, a professor of genetics at the university’s David Geffen School of Medicine, “we’ll be able to explain 10 percent of autism.”

(48) To complicate matters, researchers believe that the gene is probably just one of dozens linked to autism, many of which may trigger the disease only if a genetic predisposition is activated by some external factor.

So where does environment come into the picture? Although we have decoded our genome, our “envirome”—everything that influences a person after conception, from parenting to pollution remains a fragmented riddle.(49) To decipher the envirome’s role in the disease, William Eaton, a psychiatrist at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, recently helped to conduct a largescale study involving nearly 700 Danish children. Some intriguing correlations emerged. Scouring for trends among a host of parameters such as birth weight and socioeconomic status, scientists discovered an increased prevalence of autism both in children with a family history of schizophrenia and in those whose births involved complications such as premature or breech delivery.

(50) Casting an even wider net than the Danish survey, researchers at the University of California at Davis are conducting a study called CHARGE (Childhood Autism Risks from Genetics and the Environment) to scrutinize everything from genes to mercury exposure. “The hope is that we’ll find patterns,” says toxicologist Isaac Pessah, who is director of the school’s Center for Children’s Environmental Health. “We’re not looking for the magic bullet that causes autism.”

參考答案：

46．到3歲時，他的癥狀越來越嚴重，最后被診斷為得了一種近年來令人不安的常見疾?。汗陋毎Y。

47．這些科學家在《美國人類遺傳學雜志》上報告了這個發現，他們接下來會想辦法從集中在附近的50來個基因中找出那個真正的致病基因，這個過程不會輕松，可能還需要一年的時間。

48．令事情更為復雜的是，研究者們相信基因可能只是與孤獨癥有關的眾多原因之一，只要某種外部因素激活了一種基因傾向，其中許多原因就有可能引發這種疾病。

49．為了解密envirome在這種疾病中所起的作用，Johns Hopkins大學Bloomberg公共衛生學院的精神病學家William Eaton最近幫助進行了一項大規模的調查，調查對象涉及近700名丹麥兒童。

50．位于戴維斯的加利福尼亞大學的研究者們比丹麥調查撒的網甚至還要大，他們在做一項名為CHARGE（遺傳學和環境給兒童帶來的孤獨癥風險）的研究，對各項指標作詳細檢查，從基因到汞接觸。