翻译练习三 Big Blue’s Shareholders: Seeing Red1
2012-04-08 22:18阅读：
Big Blue’s Shareholders:
Seeing Red1
Misery may love
company, but
this was ridiculous2. More than a million
IBM stockholders last week took a nightmare ride
on a stockthey had long trusted3. IBM had
been sliding all year recently hitting 10-year lows4.
But after the company announced last Tuesday that it would,
among other things, slash another 25,000 jobs, the
stock took a historic dive5. In 48 hours, it lost 11
points, or almost 18 percent of its value, closing Wednesday at
516. On Friday it hit another new low. Big Board
officials camped out on the exchange floor to prevent
chaos, and brokers fielded frantic calls from
i
nvestors in various stages of disbelief and
agony7. “They’re screaming and hollering,” said
Carol Komskis of York Securities8. “They’re saying,
‘things like this just don’t happen in America’.”
Stock prices that rise
and fall are nothing new; that’s what makes a market9.
But Big Blue had always epitomized the blue-chip stock
that Americans could count on to send the kids to college or help
retire in style10. Some investors may be
in blissful ignorance: Pension funds across the
country are heavily invested in IBM11.
(The New York state employee pension funds alone hold 3.6 million
shares.) But the charm of stocks like IBM, General Motors and
Westinghouse was that you could feel secure in buying them even if
you didn’t know “earnings”12. Such stock
made generations of Americans faithful capitalists. “This was the
kind of stock that created wealth for a lot of people in this
country,” says Jonathan Pond, a Boston-based financial counselor
and author.
He likes to tell the
story of a Pittsburgh broker who was called by a retired
steelworker in the mid 1980s. The man had left $40,000 worth of
blue-chip-stock certificates in his safe-deposit box when his
father died, more than 20 years earlier13. Meanwhile,
those neglected pieces of paper had quietly turned into a
half-million-dollar portfolio. That’s not going to happen any more,
says Pond. “The old standby stocks are turning
into today’s and tomorrow’s
dogs14.”
Employees hurt: IBM
workers were hit hard by the crash. IBM employees and directors
hold almost 5 percent of the stock, or 27.9 million shares,
according to IBM’s latest available number. Like many
companies, IBM encourages employees to buy its own stock by selling
it to them at a discount. It’s wise enough to buy such stock in
many cases, but many employees fail to diversify
later. “It’s nice to be patriotic to your company,” says James A.
Miller, senior portfolio manager at Bartlett & Co. in
Cincinnati15. “But it’s double jeopardy” for employees
who could end up with a slashed retirement account and a
pink-slip16.
(441)
[翻译提示]
1. Big Blue: blue这里是名词，等于blue-chip
stock,即股票经济中所说的“蓝筹股”。Big
Blue即是“大蓝筹股”，在美国，它成IBM的别名。标题中的see red在本文中是一个pun（双关语），具体有哪两种意思呢？
2. 第一，Misery may love
company是英语里的一句谚语或格言，汉语中有一成语和它几乎完全对应。第二，英语汉语的文章都喜欢引用一句格言或谚语来开头，但汉语里在使用时往往需要一个引导。第三，此句中的this指什么？译者需要明白后方可下笔。
3. 句子take a nightmare ride on a
stock这个短评中，take a
ride显然是个比喻。对于原文中的修辞方式，翻译的一般原则是：能保留原文的修辞形象则尽量保留，如果不符合译语文化规范且影响原文意义的传递时，则需要调整或变通。
4. 这里的low作名词用。但为什么要用复数呢？
5. 句中为什么要用another? 用了another怎么后面的job又是复数呢？
6. point，股市术语, a measure of increase or decrease in cost or
value,通常股票发行时每股的原始价值就是一个点。我国股票每股的原始价为一元人民币。美国不清楚，可能是1美元？
7.
翻译此句有几点要注意：一是Big
Board指什么？二是field在此用作动词，何意？三是要弄清最后这个介词短语的语法关系。
8. 注意：大写的York
Securities是个什么东西呢？
9. 英语中由wh-词引起的名词从句，有时会给翻译带来小烦恼，因为没有对应的语言形式。
10. in style是个固定短语，这里与retire搭配后，具体翻译成汉语什么词才合适？
11.
此句中有两点颇值得注意：一是blissful
ignorance的形名搭配在汉语中属于异常；二是pension
funds能否在汉语中找到完全对应的概念词？
12.
此句也有两点：一是有些专有名词，它们分别指什么？汉语中有无相对固定或统一的译句？二是earnings一词，在股票经济中指什么？为何用了引号？
13. 本句中的certificate是“证书”吗？如果不是，那是什么？上下文中还有与它意思相近的词吗？英语中有些词意思相近，但在同一篇文章中可作为同义词使用，以避免重复。而且汉语这种现象较少。
14. 此句中的standby stocks,
dogs等是股票经济中的一些常用语，尽量寻找汉语对应词。
15. Cincinnati:美国城市名：辛辛那提；Bartlett & Co.
无疑是一家公司的名称，估计是什么类型的公司呢？
a pink
slip是什么？这里代表的含意又是什么？
