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2013年攻读浙江财经学院硕士学位研究生入学考试试题

科目代码：881 科目名称：专业综合 答案请写答题纸上

Part One Translation (90 points)

I. Put the English passage into Chinese (45 points).

Law Prohibiting the Use of the Word “Oriental”

The northwestern US state of Washington made headlines earlier this year when it passed a law prohibiting the use of the word “Oriental” in official contexts. Instead, the word “Asian” must be employed. The new law only bans the use of the word “Oriental” when the reference is to human beings. Therefore, one law which defines “minority group” to include “Orientals” will be changed to refer to “Asians”, but another law which refers to “Oriental medicine” will be left unchanged. According to the law’s sponsor, Korean-American state senator Paull Shin , the law was passed because the term “Oriental” is “pejorative terminology” and “offensive”.

The English language is full of other apparently contradictory tendencies for words relating to ethnicity. “Chinatown”, meaning a neighborhood where Chinese immigrants live, is proper English. But “Chinaman”, meaning a Chinese person, became offensive in America during the first half of the 20th century, even though it is a direct translation of Zhongguoren. And “Frenchman”, meaning a French person, is perfectly neutral English.

The care Yankees must take in referring to Asians is as nothing compared with the delicacy required to get through the minefield of terms for Americans of sub-Saharan African ancestry. “Colored person” is now offensive, even though it was regarded as a polite term for much of the century after the US Civil War (1861-65). On the other hand, “person of color”, meaning someone of any non-European race, is acceptable and, in some ideological circles, a favored phrase. “Negro” (the Spanish word for “black’) gave way to “black” or “Black” in the 1960s, only to yield in turn to “Afro-American” in the 1980s and “African-American” or “African American” in the 1990s.

And while one can speak of “black people” and “white people” or “blacks” and “whites”, one would be ill advised to speak of “red people” (American Indians - the “First Nations” of Canada, by the way) or “yellow people”

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