Федеральное агентство по образованию

Государственное образовательное учреждение

высшего профессионального образования

«Челябинский государственный университет»

АНГЛИЙСКИЙ ЯЗЫК

Методические рекомендации по переводу текстов профессиональной тематики

для студентов 5 курса

факультета Евразии и Востока

Челябинск

Издательство Челябинского государственного университета

2010

Одобрено учебно-методической комиссией факультета Евразии и Востока ЧелГУ.

Представленные в данных рекомендациях материалы направлены на формирование, развитие и совершенствование навыков перевода с английского/русского языка на русский/английский.

Предназначены как для аудиторной, так и самостоятельной работы студентов 5-го курса факультета Евразии и Востока, изучающих английский язык.

Составитель преподаватель Подолько А.С.

Рецензент

Translation

Texts presented in the textbook are expected to be done by students at home with the help of dictionaries, reference books etc. Then translations are analyzed with a teacher in a classroom.

When you translate stick to the following rules:

1. Read the text from the beginning to the end attentively.

2. Choose and mark the most difficult linguistic phenomena. You may need to look them up in different dictionaries and reference books.

3. Pay special attention to terms as they bear much information. If you make a mistake translating a term it may lead to considerable sense distortions. When you choose equivalents for the term you should use special dictionaries and take context into account.

4. Start doing your translation analyzing lexical, grammatical and stylistic means of the original.

5. While analyzing, divide the text into parts, choose units of translation.

6. Work out the translation of the headline, taking into account information given in the text.

7. Edit your translation.

8. Estimate the quality of your translation.

Texts for translation

Text 1

Death rate doubles in Moscow as heatwave continues

Moscow's health chief has confirmed the mortality rate has doubled as a heatwave and wildfire smog continue to grip the Russian capital.

There were twice the usual number of bodies in the city's morgues, Andrei Seltsovsky told reporters.

Meanwhile, a state of emergency has been declared around a nuclear reprocessing plant in the southern Urals because of nearby wildfires.

Ozersk was the site of Russia's worst nuclear disaster in 1957.

Some of the land around the Mayak plant in the town (known in Soviet times as Chelyabinsk-40) is believed to be still contaminated from the disaster, in which a tank of radioactive waste exploded.

Several leaks of radioactive waste have been reported from the plant in recent years.

Ozersk's administration announced on the town's website that residents were forbidden from entering the region's abundant, picturesque woodlands until further notice, and ordered urgent, unspecified fire safety measures.

'Puzzling' data

Recent death rates for parts of central Russia other than Moscow, which have had similar droughts and wildfires for more than a month, have not been released.

Soon after Mr Seltsovsky gave his information, Russia's Health Minister, Tatyana Golikova, demanded a formal clarification of his data.

Her ministry said it was "puzzled by the unofficial figures quoted at the briefing".

Mr Seltsovsky did not give a timeframe but earlier reports had spoken of the death rate in Moscow for July rising by up to 50% compared with the same period last year.

"On normal days, between 360 and 380 die - now it's around 700," Mr Seltsovsky told reporters.

Moscow, he said, had 1,500 places in its morgues and 1,300 of these were currently occupied.

While stressing there was still capacity, he added that about 30% of bereaved people were asking to have the body kept in a morgue for more than three days, "which slightly complicates the situation".

The concentration of carbon monoxide in Moscow was still more than double acceptable safety norms on Monday as smog from peat and forest wildfires continued to blanket the city.

Temperatures of more than 35C (95F) are forecast for the city until Thursday.

How peat bog fires spread

1. Peat is formed from decayed vegetation in bogs, moors or swamps.

2. Deliberate drainage or drought can expose peat to air.

3. Peat can then be ignited by wildfires or spontaneously combust. The air flow allows the peat to continue burning.

4. Once alight, the smouldering fire spreads slowly through the peat and can cause the ground above to collapse.

Doctors under pressure

Since the second half of July, at least 52 deaths in Russia as a whole have been attributed directly to fires, which have destroyed hundreds of rural homes.

Mr Seltsovsky did not attribute the rise in the mortality rate to the heatwave or smog.

But doctors, speaking off the record, have talked of morgues filling with victims of heat stroke and smoke ailments.

Reuters news agency reported on Sunday that one Moscow doctor had written on his anonymous blog - since deleted - of the stench from bodies piling up in the basement of his clinic where the fridges were full.

"[But] we can't give that diagnosis [of heat stroke and smoke ailments] - we don't want to be sacked," the blogger wrote.

"We have families to feed."

Another doctor at a major hospital, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters that staff had been instructed by senior management not to link patients' illnesses to the heatwave.

A spokeswoman for the Moscow city government declined to comment on the doctors' claims, the agency adds.

The head of the state weather service, Alexander Frolov, said on Monday that the heatwave of 2010 was the worst in 1,000 years of recorded Russian history.

"It's an absolutely unique phenomenon - nothing like it can be seen in the archives," he was quoted by Interfax news agency as saying.

Fighting the heat

According to Russia's Itar-Tass news agency, Moscow airports were working normally on Monday after last week's disruptions due to smog.

Sunday saw more than 104,000 air travellers leaving the capital - a record number, according to Russian news agencies.

Those who remain in the city of 10.5 million were being urged to wear face masks if they ventured outdoors, and to hang wet towels indoors to attract dust and cool the airflow.

Most apartments in the city lack air conditioning and there are media reports of wealthier citizens moving out of their homes into hotels, shopping malls, offices and private cars.

As of Monday morning, 557 wildfires continued to burn in Russia, 25 of them peat fires, the emergencies ministry said.

While 239 fires were extinguished on Sunday, 247 new ones were discovered.

Translate the text paying attention to the following words and phrases:

state of emergency

mortality rate

nuclear reprocessing plant

a tank of radioactive waste

unspecified fire safety measures

unofficial figures

carbon monoxide

was still more than double acceptable safety norms

have been attributed directly to fires

speaking off the record

speaking on condition of anonymity

state weather service

the head of the emergencies ministry

Text 2

Analysis: Do economic sanctions work?

By Jonathan Marcus BBC diplomatic correspondent

Do economic sanctions work? Past experience provides little hard evidence to go on.

Professor Adam Roberts is a research fellow at Oxford University - one of the great British figures in the study of international relations.

"There are very few cases where you can definitely identify sanctions as having had a success, except sometimes in combination with other factors," he says.

"Arguably they contributed something to the change in white minority Rhodesia that led to black majority rule; arguably the sanctions against South Africa were one factor that contributed to change there."

But, he insists, sanctions were only one factor among many, including guerrilla opposition in the country itself.

"So", he concludes, "it is impossible to say in either of these cases that sanctions were the decisive factor."

In July 2010 President Barack Obama signed into law a series of tougher bilateral sanctions against Iran.

These were intended to turn the screw on Tehran and to bolster existing United Nations Security Council sanctions.

The hope was that the mix of UN and bilateral sanctions - tougher measures are already being planned by the European Union - would persuade Iran to change its mind and halt its uranium enrichment programme.

So far they don't seem to be working.

Nonetheless, since the end of the Cold War sanctions have been used much more frequently as a tool of international diplomacy.

Veteran diplomat Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Britain's ambassador to the UN between 1998 and 2003, says the fundamental reason for the popularity of sanctions is "that there is nothing else between words and military action if you want to bring pressure upon a government".

"Military action is increasingly unpopular and in many ways ineffective in a modern legitimacy-oriented world, and words don't work with hard regimes. So something in between these is necessary. What else is there?" he asks.

Sanctions are all very well, but if they are to work they must be universally applied.

And as Nicholas Burns, the most senior professional US diplomat in the Bush Administration says, as far as Iran is concerned this is just not happening.