Big Brother Lives

By Russell Baker, The New York Times

New York. The year 1984 is dead and gone, but Big Brother lives.

His inescapable eye and his ever-present ear are watching, listening.

Use the phone and he’ll tape your talk.

Go to bed and he’ll bug your mattress. Also your walls, light fixtures, pajamas, sleeping pills, hot-water bottle.

Hug a girl and his wire will make you break out in hives if you are allergic to listening machines attached to women.

Take a walk and he’ll film your feet and anyone you chance to meet, poor devils, for they could end up with $75,000 in lawyer’s bills to fend off indictment for meeting a man on the street. A man who was being watched.

***

George Orwell, who created Big Brother in his novel “1984”, envisioned the ever-watching monster as a political tyrant. Orwell loved democracy, but was pessimistic about it. Living in an age of tyrants, he thought 20^th-century technology could produce indestructible political dictators.

He was wrong about this. It was the new technology that made tyranny on the Soviet model obsolete. Still, there are tyrannies and tyrannies. A world in which surveillance is inescapable cannot be everyone’s dream of a democratic Paradise.

And the surveillance is not confined to officially authorized busybodies like the FBI, Kenneth Starr and your local cop with his radar gun.

It was a private citizen with his own video camera who photographed the Los Angeles police beating Rodney King. Such cameras are everywhere nowadays. Pick your nose and you could wind up in The National Enquirer.

President Clinton’s immediate pickle results because Monica Lewinsky, apparently a compulsive gasbag, talked and talked and talked into a tape recorder on a friend’s telephone.

The sensible policy, especially if lawyers are after you, is to stay off the telephone and not talk face-to-face to anyone who refuses to be frisked for hidden radios.

As for cell phones, no sane person will say anything of the slightest consequence on them. You might as well broadcast it on network television, as Prince Charles discovered when the British press published his cell-phone chatter with the woman he loved.

I hear it said that people who have nothing to hide need not fear this strangulating technology of surveillance. And where are they, these people with nothing to hide?

As the political genius Willie Stark observes in Robert Penn Warren’s great political novel, “All the King’s Men”, man is conceived in sin, born in corruption and goes from the stink of the didy to the stench of the shroud. “There is something on everybody.”

Kenneth Starr has spent years and millions illustrating the truth of Willie’s philosophy. For lesser mortals among us, the terrible evidence of Big Brother’s triumph comes when you phone a faraway catalogue house and find that a clerk knows your full name, address, phone number and which movie you rented last Tuesday.

But this is progress. We must not whine about progress. Big Brother, we thank thee for knowing us so completely.

4 Перевод документов: контракт

При составлении контрактов и других официальных документов используется сухой канцелярский язык. Текст содержит большое количество экономических и юридических клише, сложный синтаксис, обилие номинативных конструкций. Меньше всего составителя контракта интересуют эстетика и самовыражение, поэтому текст предельно обезличен и неэмоционален. Главное в контракте – это: а) точность, б) понятность. Все эти особенности стиля переносятся и в русскоязычную версию документа.

При переводе контракта на русский язык стоит обратить внимание на следующие вещи:

· В поиске вариантных соответствий почти нет необходимости: преобладают однозначные эквиваленты и трансформации:

to deliver the goods – поставлять товар.

· Передающие обязательства сторон обороты shall infinitive и be to infinitive переводятся формами настоящего времени, без слова «должен»:

The Buyer shall (is to) remit the entire amount to the Seller’s account.

Покупатель переводит всю сумму на расчетный счет Продавца.

· В соответствии с нормой английского языка у целых числительных свыше 999 каждые три знака от конца отделяются запятой. В русском языке в этом случае пунктуация не используется:

47,350 (английский язык) – 47350 (русский язык).

Десятичные дроби в английском языке отделяются точкой, в русском языке – запятой:

6.2 (английский язык) – 6,2 (русский язык).

Во избежание ошибок особо важная цифровая информация дублируется прописью:

USD 5,290 (five thousand two hundred (and) ninety) – 5290 (пять тысяч двести девяносто) долларов США.

· Широко используются канцелярские архаизмы, в частности, сложные наречия с первым компонентом here, there, where: whereby, hereinafter и др.

Чтобы понять смысл сложных наречий с here и there, нужно мысленно заменить их местоимением it или them (по контексту), а предлог вынести вперед: therewith = with it (with them), herein = in it (in them), therewithin = within it (within them), thereon = on it (on them), therefore = for it (for them) и т. д.

The Supplier shall promptly repair the damaged Goods or parts thereof.

Поставщик в кратчайшие сроки осуществляет ремонт поврежденных изделий или их частей.

Компонент where в сложных наречиях мысленно заменяем на which с соответствующим предлогом: whereby = by which, whereafter = after which, whereof = of which и т.д.

The Contract shall enter into force as soon as it is signed by the parties, all previous correspondence and negotiations becoming null and void whereafter.

Настоящий Контракт вступает в силу с момента его подписания сторонами, после чего все предшествующие переписка и переговоры становятся недействительными.

Переведите следующий контракт на русский язык:

Дата добавления: 2015-10-13