2016年北外高翻英漢互譯（同傳）

比格TC · 發(fā)表于 2015-12-30 12:08

將第3-5段翻譯成中文。25分。
Corporate boards and the critical oversight function they play have come to the fore over the last year. You don't need to look any further than the scandal roiling ExxonMobil to understand the high stakes at play.

Exxon is facing a moment of truth with potentially huge financial ripples. Using internal company documents, Inside Climate News and The Los Angeles Times recently reported that Exxon deliberately misled the public about climate change research, even though its own scientists began warning the company about the dangers of warming global temperatures in 1977. Within days, the New York Attorney General confirmed that it has been investigating whether Exxon misled investors in a manner that violated state securities laws.

Exxon presents a perfect case for examining how building sustainability into board governance can help prevent and manage risk. In the case of Exxon, climate risk is a sustainability issue that has been raised by investors through shareholder resolutions for well over a decade. So it's logical to ask how much did Exxon's board know about the company's research on climate change, and did any of the board members have the expertise necessary to question it? Did the company's research factor into board conversations on performance, risk and opportunity? And, importantly, did the board engage with stakeholders to inform its views?

Investors are increasingly focused on the decisions made by corporate boards on corporate strategy and the extent to which it incorporates sustainability risks and opportunities. In 2013, a group of over 75 institutional investors collectively managing more than $3.5 trillion in assets sent letters to 45 of the world's largest fossil fuel companies, including Exxon, urging them to address the risks posed by climate change, including carbon asset risk.

(Carbon asset risk is the potential of fossil fuel reserves being unusable - 'stranded,' in Wall Street parlance - as the global economy transitions to low-carbon energy sources. Those risks are especially severe for fossil fuel companies if carbon-reducing efforts are successful in preventing Earth's temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.)

Board oversight and intervention have had a major impact on how companies respond. For example, only three of the fossil fuel companies initially targeted have endorsed the use of a 2 degree scenario analysis in their business planning: BHP Billiton, Statoil and ConocoPhillips. In each of these cases, the decision to move forward with the analysis was initiated from the board rather than from management. But this type of proactive approach remains the exception rather than the rule.

Corporate boards need to move from being reactive on sustainability issues, to proactively and systematically thinking about how environmental and social challenges factor into corporate strategies and performance. Ceres recently published a report, "View from the Top: How Corporate Boards can Engage on Sustainability Performance", outlining specific recommendations for proactive board engagement. Based on interviews with dozens of board members, senior corporate leaders and governance experts, the report underscores that informed oversight is critical to good governance. Among the report's key recommendations:

(1) Where a sustainability issue is material to the company, the board should include directors with expertise on key issues in question. Investors are especially focused on having companies recruit "climate competent" and "sustainability competent" directors. Companies like Prudential Financial, for example, identify "expertise in corporate responsibility/sustainability" as a board qualification. Directors and management should assess the qualifications and expertise of current directors and map this against the company's sustainability priorities. Now is an ideal time for Exxon to re-consider shareholder calls for board members with climate expertise.

(2) Boards run substantial risks when they operate as isolated entities. Engaging with external stakeholders, including investors, on sustainability priorities can mitigate those risks by giving directors a clearer view of the landscape of risks facing the company -- a view that is sometimes obscured when board directors rely solely on the perspective of company executives. The boards of three European oil and gas majors, Shell, BP and Statoil, embraced this approach and actually endorsed shareholder resolutions on climate change in 2015. Board engagement with shareholders led to a mutual understanding that better assessing climate risk would create long-term value. Nonetheless, companies like Exxon and Chevron continue to fight tooth and nail against any shareholder engagements that raise climate concerns, and requests to meet with board members are often rebuffed by management.

The research indicates that Exxon's board would be better served by hearing directly from the shareholders that have been warning about climate and carbon asset risks. The reality is that sustainability is good business. Research, including from Harvard Business School, Morgan Stanley, and others consistently show that companies that embrace sustainability outperform their peers on a variety of crucial financial metrics. It's time for boards to embrace this reality.

將第5-10段翻譯成中文。50分。

So you're standing at the edge of a cliff, chained by the ankle to someone else. You'll be released, and one of you will get a large prize, as soon as the other gives in. How do you persuade the other guy to give in, when the only method at your disposal -- threatening to push him off the cliff -- would doom you both?

Answer: You start dancing, closer and closer to the edge. That way, you don't have to convince him that you would do something totally irrational: plunge him and yourself off the cliff. You just have to convince him that you are prepared to take a higher risk than he is of accidentally falling off the cliff. If you can do that, you win. You have done it by using probability to divide a seemingly indivisible threat. And a smaller threat can be more effective than a bigger one. A threat to drag both of you off the cliff is not credible. A threat to take a 60 percent chance of that same thing might be credible.

This puzzler is dredged up (more or less intact, I hope) from memories of my favorite lecture course in college: "Games and Strategy," taught by Thomas Schelling, who was awarded a Nobel Prize for Economics yesterday. The Nobel honors his role as one of the godfathers of game theory. Schelling's particular gift has been applying the theory to real life. I took the course because it sounded festive, which it wasn't. But under Schelling's spell, the world suddenly looked completely different.

Schelling was never a charismatic figure. Short, gaunt and tweedy, with wire-frame glasses, he talked in a slow, slow monotone, stripping away irrelevant detail and exposing situations ranging from the nuclear standoff of the Cold War to a family's decision about what to have for dinner as stark dramas of warring self-interest. This was game theory.

Classical economic analysis generally assumes that we each take the world as we find it. We can "maximize" our own "utility" (as economists romantically describe the pursuit of happiness) in any circumstances, but the circumstances are a given. Game theory was born to deal with interdependence: situations where what I do depends on what you do, and what you do depends on what I do. That, of course, would cover almost all situations.

For example, what is the best way for two kids to divvy up a candy bar? The answer is easy: I cut and you choose, or vice versa. Why is this the best? Because, like free-market economics generally, it channels self-interest to serve the general interest. The cutter will split the bar as close to evenly as possible, because the chooser will get the benefit of any obvious disparity. You can apply this kind of thinking to a dozen people dividing a large pie, or 300 million people trying to govern themselves.

Economics is the social science that is closest to being a real science. It starts out with a few plausible assumptions about human motives and behavior (basically, that people act rationally in their own self-interest) and derives from them an impressive array of "laws" about the future. Game theory can also be seen as the application of econo-think to non-monetary aspects of life. There's nothing economists like better than to show how someone who seems to be behaving irrationally, or at least is marching to drummers unconnected to rationality one way or another, is actually maximizing utility like, well, mad.

Madness can be wickedly rational. If one of those two folks on the cliff can convince the other that he is just a bit nuts, that makes his threat to drag them both off the cliff much more plausible. Some defenders of Richard Nixon used to claim that the evidence of insanity that bothered a few Americans was actually a purposeful strategy to enhance the deterrent power of our nuclear arsenal.

Another favorite game theory anomaly: Weakness is strength. If you cannot do something, you cannot be forced to do it. A bus driver who cannot open the change box, even at gunpoint, is safer than a bus driver who can.

During the Cold War nuclear standoff, the challenge for both sides was to make a fundamentally irrational threat seem believable. Why would you start a nuclear war when the almost-certain result would be your own national destruction? Why would you even reply to a first strike by the other side with a strike of your own? The classic game theory insight was that your own safety depended on not being too strong. The other side had to be confident that it could survive and retaliate if you went first. Otherwise, in a crisis, it would be sorely tempted to go first.

People associate game theory with nuclear strategy, in part because of the movie "Dr. Strangelove." But game theory's real gift is to make all of life seem like a game. Which it is, isn't it?

將下文翻譯成英文。25分

蔡國慶談收藏：我選的是中國傳統(tǒng)文化的富
當(dāng)被問及收藏資金來源時，蔡國慶表示，全部來自自己的積蓄。“我要感謝我的工作，帶給我名和利，我沒有亂花，沒有過所謂奢侈的生活，我花在了最值得花的地方。我用積蓄一件件去買皇家頂級瓷器，在我心中，它們是無價的，雖說在拍賣市場是有價的。我很慶幸把有限的積蓄揮霍在了中國傳統(tǒng)藝術(shù)品上。”

　　……

　　“老派的收藏講究秘不示人，自娛自樂，最多請三五知己，半請教半炫耀地展示一番，今天的收藏卻是另一番風(fēng)景，熱鬧非凡，大張旗鼓，把灘涂拾貝的悠閑搞成了拉網(wǎng)式捕魚，豐收倒是豐收，只是缺了樂趣少了優(yōu)雅”，收藏家馬未都評價蔡國慶是“收藏大潮中的氣定神閑者，由淺入深，由近及遠(yuǎn)，慢慢選擇一個古老題材作為收藏主題，便是龍”。

將第2-3段翻譯成英文。50分。

　　土耳其是古代東西方文明交匯之地。今天二十國集團(tuán)領(lǐng)導(dǎo)人在這里齊聚一堂，共商世界經(jīng)濟(jì)發(fā)展合作大計(jì)，很有意義。二十國集團(tuán)的任務(wù)是促進(jìn)世界經(jīng)濟(jì)增長。當(dāng)前形勢下，亟需我們回答兩個問題。一是“怎么看”，要精準(zhǔn)把脈世界經(jīng)濟(jì)形勢。二是“怎么辦”，要為促進(jìn)全球經(jīng)濟(jì)增長和就業(yè)開出良方。

　　一個基本判斷是，國際金融危機(jī)深層次影響還在繼續(xù)，世界經(jīng)濟(jì)仍然處在深度調(diào)整期。回顧上世紀(jì)幾次大的全球性經(jīng)濟(jì)危機(jī)，各國應(yīng)對手段的失誤通常使經(jīng)濟(jì)難以復(fù)蘇。這次國際金融危機(jī)發(fā)生以來，各國分別采取一些財(cái)政貨幣措施，一定程度上起到了穩(wěn)定市場和扭轉(zhuǎn)頹勢的作用。現(xiàn)在看來，這次國際金融危機(jī)復(fù)雜程度遠(yuǎn)超以往，解決起來需要綜合施策，絕非一日之功。這就是為什么國際金融危機(jī)發(fā)生已經(jīng)7年，世界經(jīng)濟(jì)恢復(fù)仍然緩慢、增長仍然脆弱的原因。

　　中國古代先賢說：“善治病者，必醫(yī)其受病之處；善救弊者，必塞其起弊之原。”究其根本，世界經(jīng)濟(jì)發(fā)展到今天，上一輪科技和產(chǎn)業(yè)革命所提供的動能已經(jīng)接近尾聲，傳統(tǒng)經(jīng)濟(jì)體制和發(fā)展模式的潛能趨于消退。同時，發(fā)展不平衡問題遠(yuǎn)未解決，現(xiàn)有經(jīng)濟(jì)治理機(jī)制和架構(gòu)的缺陷逐漸顯現(xiàn)。這些因素導(dǎo)致世界經(jīng)濟(jì)整體動力不足，有效需求不振。其表象是增長乏力、失業(yè)率上升、債務(wù)高企、貿(mào)易和投資低迷、實(shí)體經(jīng)濟(jì)失速、金融杠桿率居高不下、國際金融和大宗商品市場波動等一系列問題。這就像一個人生了病，看起來是感冒發(fā)燒，但根子在身體機(jī)理出了問題。

　　找準(zhǔn)了病灶，就要對癥下藥。作為國際經(jīng)濟(jì)合作主要論壇，二十國集團(tuán)要確定目標(biāo)、指明方向、發(fā)揮領(lǐng)導(dǎo)力。我們既要治標(biāo)以求眼下穩(wěn)增長，又要治本以謀長遠(yuǎn)添動力；既要落實(shí)好以往成果，又要凝聚新的共識；既要采取國內(nèi)措施、做好自己的事，又要精誠合作、共同應(yīng)對挑戰(zhàn)。

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