2018年翻译资格考试英语口译初级模拟题：单身母亲

　　英译汉

　　It’s no surprise that Jennifer Senior’s insightful, provocative magazine cover story, “I love My Children, I Hate My Life,” is arousing much chatter – nothing gets people talking like the suggestion that child rearing is anything less than a completely fulfilling, life-enriching experience. Rather than concluding that children make parents either happy or miserable, Senior suggests we need to redefine happiness: instead of thinking of it as something that can be measured by moment-to-moment joy, we should consider being happy as a past-tense condition. Even though the day-to-day experience of raising kids can be soul-crushingly hard, Senior writes that “the very things that in the moment dampen our moods can later be sources of intense gratification and delight。”

　　The magazine cover showing an attractive mother holding a cute baby is hardly the only Madonna-and-child image on newsstands this week. There are also stories about newly adoptive – and newly single – mom Sandra Bullock, as well as the usual “Jennifer Aniston is pregnant” news. Practically every week features at least one celebrity mom, or mom-to-be, smiling on the newsstands。

　　In a society that so persistently celebrates procreation, is it any wonder that admitting you regret having children is equivalent to admitting you support kitten-killing ? It doesn’t seem quite fair, then, to compare the regrets of parents to the regrets of the children. Unhappy parents rarely are provoked to wonder if they shouldn’t have had kids, but unhappy childless folks are bothered with the message that children are the single most important thing in the world: obviously their misery must be a direct result of the gaping baby-size holes in their lives。

　　Of course, the image of parenthood that celebrity magazines like Us Weekly and People present is hugely unrealistic, especially when the parents are single mothers like Bullock. According to several studies concluding that parents are less happy than childless couples, single parents are the least happy of all. No shock there, considering how much work it is to raise a kid without a partner to lean on; yet to hear Sandra and Britney tell it, raising a kid on their “own” (read: with round-the-clock help) is a piece of cake。

　　It’s hard to imagine that many people are dumb enough to want children just because Reese and Angelina make it look so glamorous: most adults understand that a baby is not a haircut. But it’s interesting to wonder if the images we see every week of stress-free, happiness-enhancing parenthood aren’t in some small, subconscious way contributing to our own dissatisfactions with the actual experience, in the same way that a small part of us hoped getting “ the Rachel” might make us look just a little bit like Jennifer Aniston。

　　参考译文

　　毫无疑问，Jennifer Senior在有煸动意味的的杂志封面故事中表达了她的独到见解， “我爱我的孩子们，我讨厌我的生活”——这唤起了人们的谈兴。人们一谈到养孩子就会觉得这是一件完全令人愉悦、生活充实的事情。Jennifer Senior没有指出养孩子到底是使得父母快乐呢还是痛苦呢，她倒是认为，我们需要重新定义幸福：幸福不应该是一个个瞬间的快乐组合的可以被衡量的东西;我们应该把幸福视为一种过去式的状态。尽管抚养孩子的日子漫长难熬，令人筋疲力尽，但是Jennifer Senior认为，正是那些心绪沉重的时刻，日后却成为我们欢乐的源泉。

　　杂志封面上一位给力的母亲抱着一个可爱的婴儿，这种圣母与圣子(麦当娜和孩子)的图画这周在杂志上多次出现。例如杂志上讲到最近刚收养孩子的母亲——有时是刚变成单身母亲——桑德拉布鲁克，以及那种很常见的“詹尼弗阿尼斯顿怀孕了”的新闻。实际上，每周都有至少一位名人母亲、或者准母亲在杂志上笑迎读者。

　　在一个不断地庆祝生育的社会中，承认自己后悔生育孩子就相当于承认自己支持杀小猫，这难道不值得反思吗?把父母的后悔与孩子的后悔相比较，这显然并不合理。没有人会去让不情愿养孩子的父母去反思自己是否不该养孩子，但是那不幸福的没有孩子的人却为类似这样的信息所困扰：“孩子是世上唯一最可珍惜的东西”，显然，你们的不幸必须通过生儿育女才能得以消除。

　　当然，像美国周刊与人物这样的杂志提供的名人父母的形象是非常不切实际的。特别是像Bullock这样的单身母亲时更是如此。多项研究表明，有孩子的父母很少比没有孩子的夫妇更快乐，而单亲家庭是最不快乐的。这并不奇怪，因为一个人养一个孩子实在太麻烦了，没有人可以依靠。然而，你听听Sandra和Britney说的话：自己“一个人”养孩子，其实非常简单。(她们当然觉得简单了，因为她们是在周围有一帮人全天侯的侯着啊。)

　　很难想象有的人生孩子就只是很傻很天真因为Reese和Angelina这种名流使这种行为变的很光鲜，——多数成年人其实理解：养孩子可不是剪头发那样简单。但这确实有趣：反思一下我们每周看到的无忧无虑，幸福诱人的为人父母的生活会不会从一种微小的，无意识的方面加剧我们对于现实生活的不满。这种方式就好像：我们有那种想成为“ the Rachel”(老友记中的单身妈妈)的心理，这种心理，使得我们看上去有点像詹尼弗安尼斯顿(Rachel 的扮演者)。