2018上半年翻译考试catti三级笔译试题：农场破产

　　汉译英

　　Farms go out of business for many reasons, but few farms do merely because the soil has failed. That is the miracle of farming. If you care for the soil, it will last — and yield— nearly forever. America is such a young country that we have barely tested that. For most of our history, there has been new land to farm, and we still farm as though there always will be.

　　Still, there are some very old farms out there. The oldest is the Tuttle farm, near Dover,N.H., which is also one of the oldest business enterprises in America. It made the news last week because its owner — a lineal descendant of John Tuttle, the original settler — has decided to go out of business. It was founded in 1632. I hear its sweet corn is legendary.

　　The year 1632 is unimaginably distant. In 1632, Galileo was still publishing, and John Locke was born. There were perhaps 10,000 colonists in all of America, only a few hundred of them in New Hampshire. The Tuttle acres, then, would have seemed almost as surrounded as they do in 2010, but by forest instead of highways and houses.

　　It was a precarious operation at the start — as all farming was in the new colonies—and　it became precarious enough again in these past few years to peter out at last. The land is protected by a conservation easement so it can‟t be developed, but no one knows whether the next owner will farm it.

　　In a letter on their Web site, the Tuttles cite “exhaustion of resources” as the reason to sell the farm. The exhausted resources they list include bodies, minds, hearts, imagination, equipment, machinery and finances. They do not mention soil, which has been renewed and redeemed repeatedly. It‟s as though the parishioners of the First Parish Church in nearby Dover — erected nearly 200 years later, in 1829 — had rebuilt the structure on the same spot every few years.

　　It is too simple to say, as the Tuttles have, that the recession killed a farm that had survived for nearly 400 years. What killed it was the economic structure of food production.

　　Each year it has become harder for family farms to compete with industrial scale agriculture— heavily subsidized by the government — underselling them at every turn. In a system committed to the health of farms and their integration with local communities, the result would have been different. In 1632, and for many years after, the Tuttle farm was a necessity.In 2010, it is suddenly superfluous, or so we like to pretend.

　　参考译文：

　　农场破产原因很多，不过仅仅因为土壤退化而破产的却为数不多，这也正是经营农场的一大优势：如果对农田悉心照料，那么土壤将可永葆肥力，农场也可持续高产。美国是一个相对年轻的国家，历史上尚未对上述理论进行过试验论证。回顾美国的发展史，

　　在大多数历史阶段，可供开垦的土地不断涌现，现如今，美国的耕种观念依然没变，似乎美国有开垦不完的土地。

　　不过，美国还是有一些颇有年头的老农场，年头最长的当属塔特尔农场。该农场位于美国新罕布什尔州多佛市附近，也是美国历史最为悠久的商业企业之一。就在上周，塔特尔农场成了一大新闻。现农场场主、农场创始人约翰﹒塔特尔的直系继承人宣布农场破产。塔特尔农场成立于 1632 年，据说该农场出产的甜玉米特别有名。

　　1632 年是多么久远的一个年份，那年，伽利略仍在出书，约翰·洛克(著名的英国哲学家)才刚刚出生。当时，全美共有约 1 万名殖民者，而新罕布什尔只有区区几百名。那时的塔特尔农场四周森林环绕，如今的农场四周已是公路密布，庭院栉比。在新殖民地开垦农场一开始都会出现经营问题，塔特尔农场也不例外。近年来该农场再次出现经营问题，最终难逃破产的命运。塔特尔农场已经签署了保护地役权协定，不允许做其他开发之用，但是接收农场的人会不会继续农场经营还是个未知数。塔特尔农场的网页上载有一封塔特尔家族的公开信，信中称出售农场是因为“资源耗尽”。信中罗列的耗尽的资源包括：身心交瘁、创新力枯竭、设备机械老化、财力不支等等。他们唯独没有提及土壤问题，而土壤历经了循环往复的开垦(，肥力如何可想而知)。

　　在临近的多佛市有一座 “第一教区教堂”，兴建于 1829 年，比农场建立的时间晚了近 200年。如果打个比方的话，对农场的循环开垦利用就好比是该教堂的教民每隔几年就在同一地点重建教堂一样。塔特尔农场历经近 400 年的风风雨雨一直经营到现在，塔特尔家族的人称是眼下这场经济衰退使得农场难以为继。这话说起来着实轻巧。可是，真正导致农场破产的是粮食生产的结构性问题。现在，农业实行规模化生产，政府给予大力补贴，大型农场的粮食售价自然会处处低于家族经营的农场，致使这些家族农场在竞争中日益处于劣势。如果美国在粮食生产体系中切实关注农场的健康发展，统筹兼顾农场与当地发展，结局就

　　不是现在这样了/塔特尔农场就不会落到这般田地。自 1632 年建立之后的若干年里，塔特尔农场一直都是(当地发展)不可或缺的一大支柱，而在 2010 年，塔特尔农场转瞬间已成冗余之物，或者说被我们看作是一个累赘。