沪江小编:对于商界精英们来说,阅读《金融时报》(Financial Times)几乎成了每天的必修课。FT文章以分析为主,逻辑严密,经常被各类考试用作考题。非常适合学习BEC、TOEIC、GRE、GMAT的考生来阅读、练习。沪江小编精选FT上的双语文章,配上独家的学习指南,从词汇、短语、句式、文化、翻译等多方面来解读,长期坚持,相信会对英语学习有所帮助。

原文阅读:中日或竞争亚洲开发银行行长一职

It has long been convention that an American heads the World Bank, a European runs the IMF and a Japanese sits atop the Asian Development Bank in Manila.

But now that Haruhiko Kuroda will leave his position at the top of the Asian Development Bank to become governor of the Bank of Japan, western central bankers and academics are braced for the Chinese to launch efforts to install one of their own as Mr Kuroda’s successor.

 “The Chinese have long wanted control of the ADB,” said Eswar Prasad, a senior professor at Cornell University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Taro Aso, Japanese finance minister, made clear this week that Tokyo planned to fight any attempt by any other country to take the top job at the Manila-based ADB. “Japan will have to carry out election activity in order to secure the position to succeed ADB president Kuroda,” he told reporters. Mr Aso also said that Takehiko Nakao, Japan’s top currency diplomat, was among the candidates for ADB chief.

Any such Chinese push would be likely to add to tensions between the two countries, already locked in a dispute over control of the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea. It would also reinforce growing regional anxieties about China’s behaviour, with Beijing taking an increasingly prominent role in multilateral institutions in recent years.

The International Finance Corporation, the private sector financing arm of the World Bank, recently recruited Cai Jinyong as its chief executive in an indication of Beijing’s growing profile.

One likely Chinese candidate to head the ADB is Jin Liqun, at present the chairman of the supervisory board of China’s sovereign wealth fund and a vice-president at the ADB and the World Bank earlier in his career. Zhu Min, now a deputy to Christine Lagarde at the IMF and extremely well regarded, is also seen as qualified although he is likely to prefer to remain in Washington.

While China has long used its teeming foreign reserves and its own policy banks, particularly the China Development Bank, to help its neighbours build their energy and transport infrastructure, there has been a backlash to this approach in recent months.

“Nobody in the region believes in the peaceful rise of China anymore,” said the head of one local bank in Hong Kong.

Beijing’s increase in military spending is part of the reason for those concerns. But so is the feeling that China’s economic relations with its neighbours are often colonial in nature, sucking in raw materials at cheap prices and then selling finished goods in return with little local investment.

Some bankers worry that if China took the top job at the ADB, it would use its position to pursue its political agenda. In the past, China has lobbied against loans to places where it has territorial claims, such as in the province of Arunachal Pradesh in northeast India, which it claims does not belong to India at all.

Staffers at the ADB respond that the Japanese used the bank to further their own agenda at a time when many Asians with memories of the second world war were uncomfortable dealing with Japan directly.

The Japanese finance ministry has regarded the post as its preserve, staffing it with senior officials from its international side who have retired, leading to complaints in many cases that the occupant was too bureaucratic. At the same time, many potential candidates for the job have been reluctant to move to Manila, regarding it as a dangerous backwater.

学习指南:

1.Word of the day

bureaucratic: bureaucratic means involving complicated rules and procedures which can cause long delays. 官僚式的,官僚主义的。

ex1:Diplomats believe that bereaucratic delays are inevitable.
例句一:外交官们认为繁文缛节造成的延迟是在所难免的。

ex2:The department has become a bureaucratic nightmare.
例句二:该部门的官僚作风非常严重。

小编注:bureau是“局、所、司、处、属”的意思,比如FBI的全称就叫the Federal Bureau of Investigation,bureau这个词来自法语,表示办公室、桌子,最早指暗褐色的桌布,crat为希腊后缀,衍生形式有-cracy, -cratic ,-cratism, -cratically, -cracies,表示统治、权威、权力等。不妨闭上眼睛暗想几个带这些后缀的单词吧,用词根背单词是很有效的一个方法。参考词:democract 民主人士、aristocrat 贵族。

2.Phrase of the day

lobby aganst: If you lobby someone such as a member of a government or council, you try to persuade them that a particular law should be changed or that a particular thing should be done. 游说

ex:The union has attacked the plan and threatened to lobby against it.
例句:工会不但会攻击该计划,而且还扬言要游说议员反对它。

3.Sentence of the day

It has long been convention that an American heads the World Bank, a European runs the IMF and a Japanese sits atop the Asian Development Bank in Manila.
美国人领导世界银行(World Bank),欧洲人领导国际货币基金组织(IMF),日本人领导亚洲开发银行(ADB,总部位于马尼拉),这早已形成一种惯例。

小编注:之所以特地挑出这句话是因为原文中为了表达“领导”这一含义,用了三个不同的表达方式:"heads", "runs", "sit atop",这样子使得文章的用词显得非常丰富而饱含变化,令人耳目一新。我们在进行写作和翻译时,也要注意这一点,当连续出现几个相同的意义时尽量选择不同的表达。译文全部使用“领导”一词,不免略显苍白。

4.Cultural point of the day

lobby:又见lobby,主要是这个词有一个有趣的典故。lobby一词中国学生往往是用其名词“酒店大堂、休息厅”的意思,而在英语世界中,更多地是用其动词“游说”的含义,并且引申出了另一个词lobbyist,说客。lobby被引申为“游说”,还有一个小小的典故,据说美国第18任总统格兰特每日下午喜欢去华盛顿一家名叫Willard的酒店休息厅喝酒小憩。请愿者不久发现,在这家酒店的休息厅比在总统办公室向总统游说更为成功,故而给休息室(lobby)赋予了“游说”的含义。但实际上,lobby作为“政治游说”的用法早在1808年就出现在《牛津英语大词典》上,其来源不得而知。不过格兰特的故事反倒能让我们更好地记住lobby的动词用法,我们姑且就记住这个小典故吧。

5.Translation of the day

Beijing’s increase in military spending is part of the reason for those concerns. 
中国增加军事开支是其引起外界担忧的原因之一。

小编注:英文报刊中经常用一国首都来代表该国政府的立场,比如Beijing, Washington等,翻译时可以直接把它代表的国家译出来。这句翻译另一个比较值得学习的地方在于将文中作名词的increase翻译成了动词的“增加”,这是为了语句通顺和简洁而对原句单词的词性进行的变通。

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