第二十五天：英译汉模拟练习

今天的结束语是：Translators are traitors（意大利谚语：翻译即叛徒）。老子言：“信言不美，美言不信”。翻译，难！得分，不是太难！

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.”

参考答案：

46．到3岁时，他的症状越来越严重，最后被诊断为得了一种近年来令人不安的常见疾病：孤独症。

47．这些科学家在《美国人类遗传学杂志》上报告了这个发现，他们接下来会想办法从集中在附近的50来个基因中找出那个真正的致病基因，这个过程不会轻松，可能还需要一年的时间。

48．令事情更为复杂的是，研究者们相信基因可能只是与孤独症有关的众多原因之一，只要某种外部因素激活了一种基因倾向，其中许多原因就有可能引发这种疾病。

49．为了解密envirome在这种疾病中所起的作用，Johns Hopkins大学Bloomberg公共卫生学院的精神病学家William Eaton最近帮助进行了一项大规模的调查，调查对象涉及近700名丹麦儿童。

50．位于戴维斯的加利福尼亚大学的研究者们比丹麦调查撒的网甚至还要大，他们在做一项名为CHARGE（遗传学和环境给儿童带来的孤独症风险）的研究，对各项指标作详细检查，从基因到汞接触。