1、大家论坛 CATTI1赏析版 2012 年 2 月经济学人文章（英汉双语对照）汇集Contents2012.02.29WHICH IS THE BEST LANGUAGE TO LEARN? 之四阿拉伯语 12012.02.29WHICH IS THE BEST LANGUAGE TO LEARN? 之三 汉语 22012.02.28WHICH IS THE BEST LANGUAGE TO LEARN? 之二西班牙语 32012.02.25Playing with fire 玩火 42012.02.28WHICH IS THE BEST LANGUAGE TO LEARN? 之一 法语 11
2、2012.02.27The Academy awards 84 届奥斯卡金像奖 152012.02.25Attacking Iran: Up in the air 袭击伊朗，悬而未决 172012.02.25Tony Judt: History Boy 史学赤子 .262012.02.25Quantum computing: An uncertain future 量子计算机前途不明 .292012.02.25The impact of Chinese migration 中国人口迁徙带来的冲击 332012.02.20Stop the Linsanity? 停止“林来疯”？ .352012.
3、02.20Where homies can heal 拯救弟兄何处去 382012.02.18The dark side of the universe 宇宙的黑暗面 .402012.02.18Nuclear power: The 30-year itch 美国核电业三十年之痒 .512012.02.18Difficult birth, slow recovery 出生困难，恢复缓慢 542012.02.18Greece one whose dots and dashes blur before your eyes, whose vowels fade into nothingness, wh
4、ose letters change shape depending on where they appear in the word. Arabics three-letter root system for creating words adding suffixes, prefixes, midfixes, to trilateral building blocks will seem utterly alien.这是一门困难的语言。学阿拉伯语的头几年挫折感是很大的，就好像在玩图案是多云夜空的拼图一样。那些学西班牙语的人可以迅速地进步，很快就能聊他们想要点什么啤酒，或是自己的姐妹，而你则
5、必须掌握一种新的书写方式，一种在你眼前模糊不堪的点划文字。它的元音会消逝省略，它的字母在一个词内不同地方出现会有不同的形状。阿拉伯语构词的三字母词根系统在三边单元词上加前缀，后缀，中缀，看上去会是极度陌生的。But the struggle is a worthy one, and the rewards start with your ego. Knowledge of Arabic, however slight, will impress not only the monoglots and dullards who plumped for Italian, but native spe
6、akers too. Egyptians, Syrians and Palestinians, moved that you have troubled to do battle with their tongue, will shower you with praise.但是这种苦难将会是值得的，首先你的自尊会得到回报。懂得哪怕是一点阿拉伯语不但会让那些只说一种语言和那些跑去学意大利语的笨蛋们瞠目结舌，就算阿拉伯母语者也会对你佩服。发现你居然花精力和他们的语言战斗，埃及人，叙利亚人和巴勒斯坦人都会感动不已，对你赞不绝口。When you understand how beautifully
7、Arabic fits together why the root meaning “west” leads to the words for “sunset” and “strange” the sense of illumination is sublimely satisfying. No mere French subjunctive or Russian instrumental can do that. And the pleasure will never dim. Fluency may long elude you, but there will always be a fa
8、scination in picking your way through Arabics intricacies.当你开始理解阿拉伯语是多么优雅地契合起来的，为什么代表“西”的词根会构造出“日落”大家论坛 CATTI2及“奇怪”这些词，这种恍然大悟的感觉会给你一种巨大的满足感。仅仅掌握法语的虚拟语气，或是俄语的工具格是达不到这种程度的。而且这种喜悦永远不会减少。也许你花很久的时间都不能流利使用阿拉伯语，但是在你穿越错综复杂的阿拉伯语时其魅力会一直常伴在你身边。Josie Delapedits the Middle East and Africa pages for The Economist
9、 online乔茜德拉普是经济学人网站的中东及非洲版块编辑2012.02.29WHICH IS THE BEST LANGUAGE TO LEARN? 之三汉语The best language to learn, argues Simon Long, is Chinese. Look at the numbers.西蒙郎认为学汉语是最好的。看看数字就知道了“In German oder English I know how to count downUnd Im learning Chinese,” says Wernher von Braun沃纳冯 布劳恩说：“ 我知道怎么用德语或英语来进
10、行倒数，我现在在学怎么用汉语说”。Half a century ago, when Tom Lehrer wrote his satirical song, the idea of a German rocket scientist counting backwards to zero in Chinese must have sounded both exotic and rather sinister to his American audience. Now that China is ready to take over from America as the country that
11、 sends men to the moon, surely there can be no doubt that it talks the language the rest of us should be learning.半个世纪前，汤姆莱勒写下了这首讽刺歌曲。歌词讲述一位德国火箭科学家用汉语倒数发射，对于当时的美国人来说，听上去一定既奇异又可怖。现在中国已经准备接替美国，成为下一个将人送上月球的国家。世界上其他人应该学习它的语言当然是毋庸置疑的了。This is not, in fact, rocket science, but economic and political commo
12、n sense. China is the most populous nation on earth. Even when India assumes that status in the next decade or so, Chinese speakers will still far outnumber those who understand and speak Indias biggest language, Hindi, even if Pakistani speakers of Urdu, which is very similar, are added in. If the
13、point of a language is to be able to communicate with as many people as possible, there is no contest. Of course, there are many languages in China, too. But “standard Chinese”(putonghua, aka “Mandarin”), or something close to it, is understood almost everywhere, as it is taught in schools. So there
14、 is no need to agonise over which dialect to learn.实际上，这没有发射火箭那么高深，这只是政治和经济上的常识。中国是地球上人口最多的国家。即使印度在接下来十来年内人口会超过中国，使用汉语的人口依然会远远多于印度最普及的语言印度语的使用人数。就算我们把巴基斯坦使用和印度语非常相似的乌尔都语的人也算上，结果还是一样。如果说学语言的目的是为了能和尽可能多的人交流，那应该学哪门语言这个问题根本毫无悬念。当然，在中国也存在很多语言 。但是普通话，或者口音接近普通话的方言在全国各地大多数地区都能被理解，因为这是学校授课使用的语言。所以你不用犯愁到底需要学哪
15、种方言。大家论坛 CATTI3Chinas economy is going to be the biggest in the world the only question is when. You can make your own educated guess by using the clever interactive infographic at The default option is 2018. Already Chinas spectacular 30-year boom has transformed our lives. When I grew up in Londo
16、n, there were no Chinese tourists, and nothing we owned was made in China. And now? The Chinese economy is likely to continue to outpace the rich worlds for decades to come, tilting the balance of economic power. Learn Chinese, not to impress your future boss, but to understand what she is saying.中国
17、将会变成世界第一大经济体，这只是迟早的事。你可以使用 网站上设计巧妙的互动信息图来自己推测那会在什么时候发生。默认选项指向 2018 年。中国 30 年的惊人变化已经改变了我们的生活。我小时候在伦敦长大，当时那儿根本没有中国游客，我们用的所有东西都不是中国制造的。现在呢？中国的经济很可能在接下来几十年里继续以比发达国家更快的速度增长，改变世界经济强国势力之间的平衡。学汉语不是为了让你未来的老板对你刮目相看，而是为了让你能听懂她说的话。Simon Longis the Banyan columnist for The Economist西蒙郎是经济学人的 Banyan 专栏撰稿人2012.02.
18、28WHICH IS THE BEST LANGUAGE TO LEARN? 之二西班牙语Daniel Franklin argues that if you want to learn another tongue, then Spanish, with nearly 500m speakers, is the best choice .丹尼尔富兰克林认为如果你要再学一门语言，那么有将近 5 亿使用者的西班牙语是最佳选择From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, March/April 2012Imagine that the Spanish-speaking world
19、 was a single country, called Hispanidad. It covers a territory perhaps one-and-a-half times the size of China. Its population is nearly 500m, making it the worlds third most populous country, behind China and India. Among these people, the number of native Spanish-speakers is rising towards 400m; a
20、s a mother tongue, only Mandarin Chinese is bigger. Hispanidad also has a rich literature, from Cervantes to Gabriel Garca Mrquez, that is best enjoyed in the original. And you really should see an Almodvar film without subtitles. Only English and Chinese are more widely used on the internet than Sp
21、anish.想象世界上所有说西班牙语的地方都团结为一个国家，叫它西班牙语圈。其覆盖的地区面积大概会是中国的 1.5 倍。其人口将近 5 亿，意味着它会是世界人口第三大国，仅次于中国和印度。在这些人中，母语是西班牙语的人数一直在上升，接近 4 亿，母语者人数超过它的只有汉语。西班牙语圈也有丰富的文学，从塞万提斯到加夫列尔加西亚 马尔克斯，他们的作品要看原版才够味。而且你真应该在不用字幕的情况下看看阿尔莫多瓦尔的电影。在互联网上除了英语和汉语，没有语言比西班牙语更普及。So if you are in business, into the arts or just want to join la
22、conversacin, the sheer size of 大家论坛 CATTI4Hispanidad is a powerful reason to learn Spanish. But Hispanidad is not a single country. The fact that it spreads across the Americas, Spain and even parts of Africa and Asia makes the case for Spanish stronger still. After English, it is the most used inte
23、rnational language. For tourists it eases and enriches travel in the 20-plus countries where Spanish is a main language (though some may prefer to skip Equatorial Guinea). Students have an enviable choice of stimulating places to hone their Spanish skills, from Venezuela to Argentina to Spain itself
24、.所以如果你经商，对艺术感兴趣，或是只想对话，那么西班牙圈的规模是学习西班牙语的一个重要原因。而西班牙语圈并不是一个国家，其范围遍及美洲，西班牙，甚至非洲和亚洲的一些地区就更说明问题了。除了英语，西班牙语是使用最广泛的国际语言。对于游客来说西班牙语会为你在 20 多个主要是说西班牙语的国家（虽然有些人可能会选择跳过赤道几内亚）旅行提供方便，也会为旅程增色。对于学生来说，有一些令人羡慕的刺激环境可以锻炼他们的西班牙语，像是委内瑞拉，阿根廷和西班牙本身。Not forgetting the United States, the country with the second-largest num
25、ber of Spanish-speakers (about 50m and rising) after Mexico. Latinos are growing in influence culturally, commercially and politically. Nowadays, would-be presidents make sure to advertise in Spanish: Soy Mitt Romney y apruebo este mensaje.不要忘了美国，这是墨西哥以外说西班牙语人数第二大的国家（大约 5 千万，还在增加） 。拉丁裔在美国的文化，商务和政治上的
26、影响力日渐增加。今时今日，要想当总统，你得会用西班牙语打广告，所以初选中会出现这样的话：“我是罗姆尼，我同意这份讯息。 ”Even for those with no political ambitions, there is another compelling reason to pick Spanish as your second language: its easy (certainly compared with, say, Mandarin). And once youve got Spanish, youre half-way to Italian, French and Po
27、rtuguese too.就算你没有政治野心，还是有很好的理由挑选西班牙语为第二语言：它简单（和汉语比当然要简单） 。而且你一旦学会西班牙语，你学意大利语，法语和葡萄牙语就事半功倍了。Learn Spanish? Cmo no!, as they say in Hispanidad.正如他们在西班牙语圈内说的那样：学西班牙语？干嘛不呢！Daniel Franklinis The Economists executive and business editor, and edits The World in 2012丹尼尔富兰克林是经济学人的主编兼商业版编辑，并负责展望 2012的编辑2012.
28、02.25Playing with fire 玩火Financial innovation can do a lot of good, says Andrew Palmer. It is its tendency to excess that must be curbed安德鲁帕尔默认为金融创新可以有很多好处。需要控制的是其容易过头的特性。Feb 25th 2012 | from the print editionFINANCIAL INNOVATION HAS a dreadful image these days. Paul Volcker, a former chairman of Am
29、ericas Federal Reserve, who emerged from the 2007-08 financial crisis with his reputation intact, once said that none of the financial inventions of the past 25 years matches up to the ATM. Paul Krugman, a Nobel prize-winning economist-cum-polemicist, has written that it is hard to 大家论坛 CATTI5think
30、of any big recent financial breakthroughs that have aided society. Joseph Stiglitz, another Nobel laureate, argued in a 2010 online debate hosted by The Economist that most innovation in the run-up to the crisis “was not directed at enhancing the ability of the financial sector to perform its social
31、 functions”.今时今日金融创新声名狼藉。前美联储主席保罗沃尔克安然度过了 200708 年的金融危机，其名声没有受到损害。他曾说过过去 25 年所有的金融发明都比不上自动提款机的发明。曾获得过诺贝尔奖的经济学家兼辩论家保罗克鲁格曼写过他无法想出任何近期的重要金融突破是对社会有益的。另一位诺贝尔奖获得者约瑟夫斯蒂格利茨曾在 2010 年经济学人主持的网上辩论里提出观点，认为金融危机前的大多数创新“并不是为了增加金融界执行其社会功能所设计的”。Most of these critics have market-based innovation in their sights. There
32、 is an enormous amount of innovation going on in other areas, such as retail payments, that has the potential to change the way people carry and spend money. But the debateand hence this special reportfocuses mainly on wholesale products and techniques, both because they are less obviously useful th
33、an retail innovations and because they were more heavily implicated in the financial crisis: think of those evil credit-default swaps (CDSs), collateralised-debt obligations (CDOs) and so on.大多数批评者都以市场驱动的创新为对比。某些金融领域，例如零售支付，正在不停产生大量有潜力改变人们携带和花费金钱方式的创新。但是现在关于金融创新的辩论，以及本专题的焦点是着眼于批发型产品和技术的。这不仅是因为它们和零售创
34、新相比表面的用处更小，也是因为金融危机的很大一部分责任被归咎在它们头上：想想万恶的信贷违约掉期（CDS） ，债务担保证券（ CDO）等等产品吧。This debate sometimes revolves around a simple question: is financial innovation good or bad? But quantifying the benefits of innovation is almost impossible. And like most things, it depends. Are credit cards bad? Or mortgages?
35、 Is finance as a whole? It is true that some instrumentsfor example, highly leveraged onesare inherently more dangerous than others. But even innovations that are directed to unimpeachably “good” ends often bear substantial resemblances to those that are now vilified.这场辩论有时围绕着一个简单问题：金融创新到底是不是一件好事？但是
36、要想量化创新的好处几乎是不可能的。和大多数事物一样，它可好可坏。信用卡好不好？按揭贷款呢？金融业整体呢？确实，有些金融产品，例如高杠杆产品本质上比其它产品要更危险。但是即使那些定位在毫无瑕疵的“良好”目标上的创新也经常变得和那些现在被广泛诟病的创新有大量的相似之处。For a demonstration, look at Peterborough. The cathedral city in Englands Cambridgeshire is known for its railway station and an underachieving football club nicknamed
37、 “the Posh”. But it is also the site of a financial experiment that its backers hope will have big ramifications for the way public services are funded.作为例子，看看彼得伯勒。这座位于英格兰剑桥郡内的大教堂城市以火车站和一支表现不佳，被昵称为“the Posh”的足球俱乐部闻名。但是这个城市也是金融实验的场所。其支持者希望这些实验可以对公共服务获取资金的方式有深远的影响。Peterborough is where the proceeds of
38、 the worlds first “social-impact bond” are being spent. This 大家论坛 CATTI6instrument is not really a bond at all but behaves more like equity. In September 2010 an organisation called Social Finance raised 5m ($7.8m) from 17 investors, both individuals and charities. The money is being used to pay for
39、 a programme to help prevent ex-prisoners in Peterborough from reoffending. Reconviction rates among the prisoners recruited to the scheme will be measured against a national database of prisoners with a similar profile, and investors will get payouts from the Ministry of Justice if the Peterborough
40、 cohort does better than the rest. If all goes well, the first payouts will be made in 2013.世界上第一份“社会影响债券”筹集的资金就用在彼得伯勒。该工具实际上并不是一种债券，而更像是股票。2010 年 9 月一个名为“社会融资”的组织从 17 个包括了个人和慈善机构的投资方手里一共筹集到 500 万英镑（780 万美元） 。该资金用于支付一项社会项目，来帮助彼得伯勒有前科的人士，防止他们重犯。该项目涵盖的罪犯的再犯率会和国家数据库内情况相似的罪犯的再犯率加以比较衡量，如果彼得伯勒的再犯率比全国水平要好，
41、那么投资者就能从司法部拿到收益。如果一切顺利，第一笔收益将会在 2013 年支付。The scheme is getting lots of attention, and not just in Britain. A mixture of social and financial returns is central to a burgeoning asset class known as “impact investing”. Linking payouts to outcomes is attractive to governments keen to husband scarce res
42、ources. And if service providers like the people running the Peterborough prisoner-rehabilitation scheme can get a lump sum up front, they can plan ahead without bearing any financial risk. There is talk of introducing social-impact bonds in Australia, Canada and the United States.该项目吸引了不少注意力，其中也有来自
43、英国国外的。现在有一类名为“影响投资”的资产类别正在日益扩大，将社会回报和金融回报混合在一起正是该资产类别的核心概念。对那些急于将稀少的资源经济地使用的政府来说，把收益和项目结果联系起来是很有吸引力的。而且如果一些社会服务供应方，例如彼得伯勒那些主持罪犯改造项目的人士可以在一开始就获得一整笔资金，他们就可以在不需要承担任何金融风险的情况下进行长远的规划。目前澳大利亚，加拿大和美国都在讨论引入社会影响债券。Here, surely, is a financial innovation that even the industrys critics would agree is worth try
44、ing. Yet in fundamental ways an ostensibly “good” instrument like a social-impact bond is not so different from its despised cousins. First, at its root the social-impact bond is about creating a set of cashflows to suit the needs of the sponsor, the provider and the investor. True, the investors in
45、 the Peterborough scheme may be more willing than the average individual or pension fund to sacrifice financial returns for social benefits. But as Franklin Allen of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and Glenn Yago of the Milken Institute, a think-tank, argue in their useful book,
46、 “Financing the Future”, the thread that runs through much wholesale financial innovation is the creation of new capital structures that align the interests of lots of different parties.显然，即使金融界的批评者也会承认这项金融创新值得一试。但是一些像是社会影响债券这样表面“良好” 的金融工具在本质上和其倍受鄙视的近亲产品没有不同。首先，社会影响债券的基础在于为满足支持者，提供者和投资者的需要创造一套现金流。是的
47、，彼得伯勒的投资者也许比一般的个人投资者或养老基金更乐于牺牲金融回报来换取社会利益。但是有一本很有用的书，题为为未来融资 （宾州大学沃顿商学院的富兰克林艾伦和智囊机构米尔肯学院的格伦雅各所著） ，其中谈到大多数批发金融创新中的主要成分都是创造新资本结构来使多方的利益能够一致。大家论坛 CATTI7Second, the social-impact bond is based on the concept of risk transfer, in this case from the government to financial investors who will get paid only
48、 if the scheme is successful. Risk transfer is also one of the big ideas behind securitisation, the bundling of the cashflows from mortgages and other types of debt on lenders books into a single security that can be sold to capital-markets investors. The credit-default swap is an even simpler risk-
49、transfer instrument: you pay someone else an insurance premium to take on the risk that a borrower will default.其次，社会影响债券是基于风险转移这一概念的。在以上例子中就包含了将风险从政府移到了那些只有项目成功才能获得收益的金融投资者身上。风险转移也是证券化背后的主要思想。证券化将按揭贷款和其它贷方账簿上的各种债务产生的现金流打包成一份证券，可以出售给资金市场上的投资者。信贷违约掉期是一种原理甚至更简单的风险转移工具：你付其他人保费，让他帮你承担借方违约的风险。Third, even at this early stage the social-impact bond is grappling with the difficulties of measurement and standardisation. An obvious example i
