第四届CASIO杯翻译竞赛
征文启事
由上海翻译家协会和上海译文出版社《外国文艺·译文》杂志共同承办、以推进我国翻译事业的繁荣发展，发现和培养翻译新人为宗旨的CASIO杯翻译竞赛，继成功举行了三届之后，已成为翻译界的知名赛事。今年，本届竞赛特设两个语种——英语和俄语。具体参赛规则如下：
一、本届竞赛为英语、俄语翻译竞赛。
二、参赛者年龄：45周岁以下。
三、竞赛原文刊登在2007年第3期（2007年5月出版）的《外国文艺·译文》杂志、上海译文出版社网站www.yiwen.com.cn及上海翻译家协会网站www.sta.org.cn。
四、本届翻译竞赛评选委员由各大高校、出版社等专家学者组成。
五、参赛译文必须用电脑打印，寄往：上海市福建中路193号上海译文出版社《译文》杂志编辑部，邮政编码200001。信封上注明：CASIO杯翻译竞赛。为了体现评奖的公正和客观性，译文正文内请勿书写姓名等任何与译者个人身份信息相关的文字或符号，否则译文无效。请另页写明详尽的个人信息，如姓名、性别、出生年月日、工作学习单位及家庭住址、联系电话、E-MAIL地址等，恕不接受以电子邮件和传真等其他形式发来的参赛稿件，参加评奖的译文恕不退还。
六、参赛译文必须独立完成，合译、抄袭或请他人校订过的译文均属无效。
七、截稿日期为2007年7月31日（以邮寄当日邮戳为准）。
八、为鼓励更多的翻译爱好者参与比赛，提高翻译水平，两个语种的竞赛各设一等奖1名（证书及价值6000元的奖金和奖品），二等奖2名（证书及价值3000元的奖金和奖品），三等奖3名（证书及价值2000元的奖金和奖品），优胜奖20名（证书及价值300元的图书），此外还设优秀组织奖1名（价值5000元的奖金和奖品）。各奖项在没有合格译文的情况下将作相应空缺。
九、《译文》将于2007年第6期（2007年11月出版）公布评选结果并刊登优秀译文，竞赛结果同时在上海译文出版社和上海翻译家协会网站上公布。
十、以上条款的解释权归上海译文出版社所有。
第四届CASIO杯翻译竞赛原文二
Reservoir Frogs
(Or Places Called Mama’s)
For the first time since the decline of Dadaism, we are witnessing a revival in the fine art of meaningless naming. This thought is prompted by the US release of the British film Trainspotting, and by the opening of Lanford Wilson’s new play Virgil is Still the Frogboy. Mr Wilson’s play is not about Virgil. No frogs feature therein. The title is taken from an East Hampton, Long Island, graffito to whose meaning the play offers no clues. This omission has not diminished the show's success.
As Luis Bunuel knew, obscurity is a characteristic of objects of desire. Accordingly, there is no trainspotting in Trainspotting; just a predictable, even sentimental movie that thinks it's hip. (Compared to the work of, say, William S. Burroughs, it’s positively cutesy.) It has many admirers, perhaps because they are unable even to understand its title, let alone the fashionably indecipherable argot of the dialogue. The fact remains: Trainspotting contains no mention of persons keeping obsessive notes on the arrival and departure of trains. The only railway engines are to be found on the wallpaper of the central character’s bedroom. Whence, therefore, this choo-choo moniker? Some sort of pun on the word ‘tracks’ may be intended.
Irvine Welsh’s original novel does offer some help. The section titled ‘Trainspotting at Leith Central Station’ takes the characters to a derelict, train-less station, where one of them attacks a derelict human being who is, in fact, his father, doling out a goodly quantity of what Anthony Burgess’s hoodlum Alex, in A Clockwork Orange, would call ‘the old ultraviolence’. Clearly, something metaphorical is being reached for here, though it's not clear exactly what. In addition, Welsh thoughtfully provides a glossary for American readers: ‘Rat-arsed--drunk; wanker - masturbator; thrush - minor sexually transmitted disease’. At least an effort at translation is being made. Out-and-out incomprehensibilists disdain such cosiness.
How many readers of A Clockwork Orange, or viewers of Stanley Kubrick’s film of the book, knew that Burgess took his title from an allegedly common, but actually never-used, British simile: ‘queer as a clockwork orange’? Can anyone recall the meaning of the terms ‘Koyaanisqatsi’ and ‘Powaqqatsi’? And were there any secrets encrypted in ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’, or was it just a song about a flying girl with a necklace?
Nowadays, dreary old comprehensibility is still very much around. A film about a boy-man called Jack is called Jack. A film about a crazed baseball fan is called The Fan. The film version of Jane Austen’s Emma is called Emma.
However, titular mystification continues to intensify. When Oasis, the British pop phenoms, sing ‘(You’re my) Wonderwall’, what can they mean? ‘I intend to ride over you on my motorbike, round and round, at very high speed?’ Surely not. And Blade Runner? Yes, I know that hunters of android ‘replicants’ are called ‘blade runners’: but why? And yes, yes, William S. Burroughs (again!) used the phrase in a 1979 novel; and, to get really arcane, there’s a 1974 medical thriller called The Bladerunner by the late Dr Alan E. Nourse. But what does any of this have to do with Ridley Scott's movie? Harrison Ford runs not, neither does he blade. Shouldn’t a work of art give us the keys with which to unlock its meanings? But perhaps there aren’t any. Perhaps it's just that the phrase sounds cool, thanks to those echoes of Burroughs, Daddy Cool himself.
In 1928, Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali co-directed the Surrealist classic Un Chien Andalou, a film about many things, but not Andalusian dogs. So it is with Quentin Tarantino’s first film, Reservoir Dogs. No reservoir, no dogs, no use of the words ‘reservoir’, ‘dogs’ or ‘reservoir dogs’ at any point in the movie. No imagery derived from dogs or reservoirs or dogs in reservoirs or reservoirs of dogs. Nada, or, as Mr Pink and Co. would say, ‘Fuckin’ nada.’
The story goes that when the young Tarantino was working in a Los Angeles video store his distate for fancy-pants European auteurs like, for example, Louis Malle manifested itself in an inability to pronounce the titles of their films. Malle’s Au Revoir les Enfants defeated him completely (oh reservoir les oh fuck) until he began to refer to it contemptuously as - you guessed it – ‘those, oh, reservoir dogs’. Subsequently he made this the title of his own movie, no doubt as a further gesture of anti-European defiance. Alas, the obliqueness of the gibe meant that the Europeans simply did not comprenday. ‘What we have here,’ as the guy in Cool Hand Luke remarked, ‘is a failure to communicate.’
But these days the thing about incomprehensibility is that people aren’t supposed to get it. In accordance with the new zeitgeist, therefore, the title of this piece has in part been selected – ‘sampled’ - from Lou Reed’s wise advice – ‘Don’t eat at places called Mama’s’ - in the diary of his recent tour. To forestall any attempts at exegesis (‘Author, Citing Dadaism’s Erstwhile Esotericism, Opposes Present-Day “Mamaist” Obfuscations’), I confess that as a title it means nothing at all; but then the very concept of meaning is now outdated, nerdy, pre-ironic. Welcome to the New Incomprehensibility: gibberish with attitude.
August 1996