专业硕士英语课文翻译 顾明远主编

Unit 1 Text1 What’s the Big Idea?

Nokia sponsors a wide range of educational, cultural and other activities. One of the most unusual activities was the sponsoring of ―Future Histories‖, a collection of stories by prominent writers of science fiction .Why should a telecommunications company become involved with literature? It could be called ―research‖.诺基亚公司举办了一系列有关教育文化的的意义活动。其中最不寻常的一项活动是举办―未来的历史‖，由科幻小说作家们收集的小说故事系列。为什么一个通讯公司变得与文学有牵涉，它就是所谓的―科学研究‖。

Science and literature have traditionally been hostile to each other. Writers have regarded scientists as dull creatures who take pleasure in destroying great words of the imagination with boring facts. Scientists have thought of writers as frivolous people with no respect for the rules of evidence. At the heart of their mutual suspicion is the question of who owns the truth. Does something become real when it is imagined or when it is physically created?科学和文学传统上就相互敌对。文学作家认为：科学家们是一群愚蠢的生物，他们总是破坏人类伟大的想象取乐。科学家则认为：文人作家们是轻浮的，没有尊循事实依据，两者相猜疑的中心交点在于：到底是谁拥有真理事实，是先有想像后来成成真呢？还是实际设计出变成真的？

Science fiction is the one area where these tow opposing groups have met and exchanged ideas . As its name suggests, science fiction is literature which predicts the technology of the future and the effect this will have on human society .Over the years many of their speculations have been remarkably accurate. Space travel, communications satellites, nuclear power, robotics, cloning and mobile telephony have all appeared in books before they appeared in reality. 科幻小说是两大对立集团相互邂逅并交流思想的公共领域。顾名思义，科学小学是预测未来科技和如何影响人类社会的文学作品。近年来，许多想象推测早己变成了现实，如太空旅行，通讯卫星，原子核能，机器人，克隆技术和移动电话，它们都是先出现在作品中然后才变成现实的。

Yet sometimes the writers have got it wrong. Nobody predicted the emergence of personal computers, for instance. And contact with alien beings from other planets still seems a long way off, despite being a common subject of science fiction.有时，科幻作家们也会搞错。从来没有人能预言个人电脑的出现，反之，尽管外星人早己成为科幻作品的描述对象，但到现在，与外星人的联系还有很长一段距离要走。

Over the years, the time between the prediction of new technology in science fiction and its actual discovery has become shorter. It took 100years before the moon landings predicted by the French writer Jules Verne actually took place. The idea of robots first emerged in the 1920s. The first robots were built in the 1970s.And in the 1940s,Arthur.C.Clarke predicted that communication satellites would circle the globe by the year 2000. These arrived 30 years before they were due.

近年来，在科幻小说中新技术的预言和它变为现实，两者之间的时间在缩短。法国科幻小说家儒勒 凡尔纳预言的人类登月，整整用了100年才变成现实。机器人的设想，再现在19世纪20年代，70年代就真正建成了。十九世纪小说家科拉克预言，到2000年才能实现卫星通讯，结果提前30年，这一设想就实现了。

Richard Dawkins, a British scientist, recently stated that scientific discovery revealed the beauty and complexity of nature in a way that the human imagination could never do.英国科学家，理查德 道克温斯最近声名：科学发现能够展示大自然的美和复杂性，相反人类的想像则做不到。

Yet this is not the end of the road for science fiction. Many of the developments it has predicted are used for communication and we are now in what is called the ―information age‖. And the people who have to do the work complain of ―information overload‖.然而这并不是科幻小说的粉途末路，它所预言的很多发展正用信息交流，我们正在所谓的―信息时代‖，西方国家超过三分之一的人口受聘于信息科技产业。世界上的领导人倡导―知识型社会‖的建立。人们尽管抱怨―信息负担过重‖但还必须从事这一行业。 In the middle of all this, there is a real need for people with vision. The future of business communication depends on the ability to imagine new realities and then produce products and services for them. In ―Future Histories‖, one story deals with an investor who constantly travels in search of new opportunities in high technology. He backs a company which produces intelligent robots, capable of learning new tasks from their environment. One day, he notices that the robots have stopped working. Eventually, he realizes that

they are asking themselves a question which has never occurred to him. Why are we doing this? Writers in the information age have moved from predicting scientific discoveries of the future. Now they speculate about the effect of the revolution of communication on human society. In a world dominated by business and technology, there is still an important role to be played by people who can answer the question – what’s the big idea?

在所有问题中，人们具有想像力是必须的。未来的商业交流主要依赖于把幻想变为现实的能力。能力具备了，才能生产出更多的产品和享有更多的服务，在―未来的历史‖中，讲述了一个投资人的故事，他经常奔波于探寻高科技带来的新机遇。 他主办了一家公司，主要 …… 此处隐藏：25058字，全部文档内容请下载后查看。喜欢就下载吧 ……