Трансформация фразеологизмов в англоязычной прессе и их перевод на русский язык

Также интересен перевод диалогов, включённых в статьи. Зачастую, помимо типичных для диалогов разговорных форм и более простой лексики, используются также сленг и даже жаргонные выражения. Подобную лексику при переводе мы передавали соответствующими русскими эквивалентами или вариантами, отражающими стилистическую окраску высказывания. Например:

We're not going to get locked up. I know all the cops in this town, Нас не посадят. Я знаю всех ментов в этом городе.

As in America, the Hong Kong waste-management business was dogged by organized crime, the syndicates known in China as Triad. - Как и в Америке, в Гонконге бизнес по переработке отходов затравливается организованной преступностью, синдикатами, известными в Китае как Триады.

Так как статья Wastepaper Queen изобилует именами собственными, различного рода названиями, способы их перевода заслуживают особого внимания.

Во-первых, в статье много китайских имён и фамилий, а также названий. Наиболее удобными способами их перевода являются на наш взгляд транслитерация и транскрипция. Например, Yang Bin - Ян Бинь, Zhang De En - Чжан Де Ен, Zhang Xiubo - Чжан Сибо.

Для некоторых имён в переводческой практике уже сложились традиционные варианты перевода. В этом случае, проконсультировавшись с Интернет-источниками, мы использовали общепринятые варианты, даже если они отличались от варианта, полученного при транслитерации данных имён. Например, Wong Kwong-Yu - Вон Квон Ю, Liu Ming Chung - Луи Минг Чанг. Таким же образом переводились названия географических объектов: Hong Kong - Гонконг, Dongguan - Донгуань, Guangdong Province - провинция Гуйчжоу

Такие названия, как The Hurun, Island Shangri-La Hotel, мы передавали способом прямого включения, в скобках давая их транскрипцию.

Заключение

Данная дипломная работа посвящена трансформациям фразеологических единиц и особенностям их перевода с английского языка на русский.

Рассмотрев теории известных лингвистов, изучавших проблемы фразеологии (А.В Кунина, Н.Н Амосовой, В.В. Виноградова), предложенные ими классификации фразеологических единиц, в работе были выделены основные признаки, присущие всем фразеологическим единицам. Были обобщены и систематизированы классификации трансформаций фразеологических единиц а также рассмотрены основные способы перевода фразеологических единиц с английского на русский язык.

По результатам проведённой работы можно сделать следующие выводы:

1. Фразеологические единицы отличаются от своих лексических синонимов стилистически и характеризуются большей экспрессивностью и выразительностью.

2. Фразеологические единицы в текстах газет чаще всего используются в модифицированном виде.

3. Трансформации фразеологических единиц можно подразделить на семантические, лексические, синтаксические, морфологические и словообразовательные.

4. Существует 2 основных способа перевода фразеологических единиц - фразеологический и нефразеологический.

5. Для адекватного перевода фразеологической единицы переводчику необходимо учитывать и по возможности полностью передать все её компоненты, а именно: образный, предметный, эмоциональный, стилистический и национально-этнический компоненты.

6. Наибольшую трудность для перевода представляют английские фразеологические единицы, не имеющие эквивалентов в русском языке. Для их передачи используются приёмы лексического, дословного и описательного перевода. При этом переводчик должен стараться по возможности сохранить образный характер исходной единицы.

Библиографический список

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ПРИЛОЖЕНИЕ 1. ОРИГИНАЛ ТЕКСТА ПЕРЕВОДА.

LETTER FROM CHINA

WASTEPAPER QUEEN

She's China's Horatio Alger hero. Will her fortune survive?

BY EVAN OSNOS

Last fall, on the afternoon of October 10th, Cheung Yan was preparing to unveil the year-end financial summary for Nine Dragons Paper, the enterprise that she co-founded thirteen years ago and built into China's largest paper manufacturer. The press conference had drawn reporters and cameramen to a ballroom at Hong Kong's Island Shangri-La Hotel, and, just before it was scheduled to begin, Cheung sat in a hushed anteroom, alone on a silk sofa, collecting her thoughts.

She wore a chartreuse mandarin-collared jacket buttoned to her chin, and her hair was no-fuss short. At the age of fifty-two, Cheung is petite but sturdy, with an expressive face that radiates intensity. Inside her company, she is known as the Chairlady. Throughout China, she is also known as the Queen of Trash. She earned her nickname by conquering an obscure niche that tunes global trade to peak efficiency: she buys mountains of filthy American wastepaper, hauls it to China at cheap rates, then pulps and reforms it into paperboard for boxes bearing goods marked "Made in China." One of her factories is the largest paper mill in the world.

After Cheung registered her company on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, in 2006, she rose to No. 1 on a list of China's richest people, becoming the first woman to hold the position. The Hurun Report, the Shanghai magazine that produces the list, estimated her worth that year at $3.4 billion. The following year, Cheung's wealth ballooned further, to more than ten billion dollars, and the magazine calculated that she was the richest self-made woman in the world, ahead of Meg Whitman and J. K. Rowling. She became a star of China's industrial revolution: a plainspoken manufacturing baroness and a mother of two. When Oprah did a segment on inspirational mothers around the globe, she showed a clip about Cheung and said, "I love a self-made mom."

Yet to financial analysts the timing of Cheung's press conference was ominous; as in politics, a corporate announcement reserved for 4:15 P.M. on a Friday is rarely upbeat. They were right: consumer demand was sinking in America, and factories in China that buy cardboard were shutting down. The global trade that had built Cheung's fortune was now dismantling it. Almost as remarkable was a recent reversal of her public image. Within a few months, she had become the antihero of an era in China in which unbridled capitalism had driven the gap between rich and poor to its greatest divide since economic reforms began, thirty years ago. A labor-rights group had accused Cheung of being a sweatshop boss, and a Chinese newspaper invoked the exploitation of the American Gilded Age to accuse her of "turning blood into gold." Her stock price had tumbled, slashing her personal wealth by more than seven billion dollars in less than a year, by Hurun's estimate. Her company was saddled with so much debt that Mark Chang, a Merrill Lynch analyst, told me that the question was "Will they go bust?"

The spectacle of one of China's richest industrialists reduced to a struggle for solvency suggests some of the pressures posed by a slowdown that has unnerved Chinese leaders in its speed and depth. Deng Xiaoping once ordained a starring role for plutocrats. “Rang yi bu fen ren xian fu qi lai”, he declared. “Let some people get rich first.” In the thirty years since Deng unshackled China's economy, the entrepreneurs who stitched it into global markets have made China far more prosperous, but also, it turns out, acutely vulnerable. In the southern city of Dongguan, where Nine Dragons is based, Smart Union, a giant toymaker with some sixty-five hundred employees that once supplied Mattel and Hasbro, went bust so fast last October that throngs of its workers swarmed the plant's gates, demanding unpaid wages. The local government sent riot police to guard the plant and appealed to the angry workers not to do "anything that would hurt or cause concern to your parents and family." Other factory bosses on the brink have simply fled without a trace. At least six hundred and seventy thousand Chinese businesses failed last year, according to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a government-run think tank. These events hardly signal an end to China's economic rise -- a certain level of labor unrest and business turnover exists in China in the best of times - but the scale has begun to look less like an ordinary downturn than like a pivot in the very nature of China's surge into the free market. "One of the characteristic features of American capitalism since the Gilded Age has been its ruthless readiness to abandon unprofitable sectors," Niall Ferguson, the Harvard historian, told me. "Once upon a time, the American textile industry was an enormous part of the economy. It scarcely exists anymore."

Waiting to face the cameras on October 10th, Cheung let out a short, awkward laugh and told me, “I'm in a good mood." She scanned the faces around her, which included her husband, her brother, and two executives. "You have to be confident in order to make others confident," she said, and stalked down the hall toward the press. By the time her event was over, the share price of Nine Dragons had sunk another sixteen per cent, to the equivalent of twenty-three cents, its lowest level ever.

Despite Deng's proclamation, China is deeply ambivalent about its tycoons. For a long time, they were ciphers. (In 2002, Forbes published its list of China's richest, with a photograph of people wearing paper bags over their heads.) But in the early years of this decade tycoons preened as more of them took companies public, and their ranks soared. In 2006, the number of Chinese billionaires jumped sevenfold, to a hundred and six people, by Hurun's count, encompassing property developers, Internet techies, and retail magnates. But this era of glamour has been accompanied by an era of prosecution. Yang Bin, a flower-growing mogul who was once ranked as the second-richest person in China, is serving eighteen years in prison on fraud and bribery charges. Last November, Wong Kwong-Yu, the founder of an electric-appliance chain called Gome and the reigning richest person in China, was reportedly detained in what the Chinese press called an investigation into manipulation of shares in his brother's pharmaceutical company. (Wong resigned from Gome's board earlier this year, a company representative would not comment on the investigation.) At such moments, the rich list has come to be called the "death list."

Cheung hedges by casting herself as a kind of socialist Horatio Alger hero. "We all sacrifice a lot for the company," she told me when I visited her at her office last fall. “It is very demanding. It's not like, Today, I expend effort and tomorrow I go off and play golf or go shopping!" The headquarters of Nine Dragons Paper sprawls across a site, nearly a square mile in area, in Dongguan, a port-city fusion of industry and luxury that calls to mind the oil capitals of the Persian Gulf. Cranes and smokestacks shimmer in the heat beside manicured topiaries and overchilled office towers. The twelve-story office of Nine Dragons is topped by an emerald-green glass pyramid directly above Cheung's executive suite. Visitors to her floor are greeted by a gurgling white stone fountain in the shape of a lotus, roughly as tall as she is. Since her announcement in Hong Kong, Cheung had been inundated with questions from bankers, investors, and securities analysts about the fate of the company, and this had sharpened her characteristic pugnaciousness. "Why are we in debt?" she asked, fixing me with a level gaze. "I didn't misuse this money on derivatives or something! I took a high level of risk because that is the preparation for the future, so that we will be first in the market when things change."

Compared with some of the flashier members of China's new generation of super-rich, Cheung is ah unreconstructed industrialist. Where they are cool and serene, she is impish and combustible. They pursue a work-life balance and experiment with Taoism; she maintains devout faith only in production. Like others her age -- she is old enough to have witnessed the havoc of the Cultural Revolution and young enough to have recovered from it -- Cheung is impatient with ideology, but her faith in efficiency borders on the counterproductive; by her count, she is pulled over for speeding at least once a year, because she "can't stand wasting time on the road”. Cheung is perpetually leaning forward, propelled around the room by spasms of exuberance. In conversation, she can sound as if she were channelling China's industrial id. When I asked her about the future of a company that seemed to have grown faster than its market, she shook her head. “The market waits for no one”, she said. “If I don't develop today, if I wait for a year, or two or three years, to develop, I will have nothing for the market, and I will miss the opportunity. And we will just be very ordinary, like any other factory!" She went on, "We only have a certain number of opportunities in our lifetime. Once you miss it, it's gone forever."

Opportunities have vanished faster than expected. A year ago, China's leaders worried about inflation and an economy that they believed was growing too fast. Since then, economic growth has dropped to its lowest point since 2001, and the World Bank is forecasting that China's growth will sink to 6.5 per cent this year, the lowest point in at least nineteen years. To check the slide, the government has announced a stimulus plan worth four trillion yuan, or five hundred and eighty-six billion dollars. Nearly half of that will go toward the construction of railways, roads, airports, and power supplies, and a quarter is earmarked for reconstruction following the Sichuan earthquake and other disasters. (Some economists warn that the effect could be limited, because part of that spending was already planned.) Unemployment and crime are increasing, and the state media have begun to warn that social unrest could rise. President Hu Jintao hasn't bothered to conceal the fact that the crisis has become a matter of political survival - "a test of our Party's capacity to govern," as he put it in the official People's Daily newspaper.

As Cheung and I talked, her husband, Liu Ming Chung, ambled in and slumped into a chair beside her. He had been trained as a dental surgeon, but he now serves as the C.E.O of Nine Dragons. He is tall and approachably low-key, her physical opposite. When she speaks, she swats and grips the air for emphasis, alternating between Cantonese and Mandarin, which she utters with a pronounced Manchurian accent. To Chinese ears, this identifies her as a product of China's frigid northeast, a hard-drinking industrial domain known for its prolific production of two species: entrepreneurs and corrupt bureaucrats. Cheung spends much of her time in Hong Kong, a city that sanctifies aristocracy, yet the persona she projects is that of a harried manager. Her fingers are bejewelled, but she shows little interest in amassing influence, real estate, art, or any of the usual trappings of wealth. Over the years, she has shed a wardrobe of loud prints and lacy cuffs in favor of Chanel-style suits, yet she seems interested in name brands only insofar as, in her words, they represent "the kind of image" she tries to maintain. Her ambition is so specific to expanding her business that, had she not become a billionaire papermaker, she would, she thinks, have enjoyed being a stay-at-home mother. At the company's headquarters in China, she and her husband live in a large converted apartment on the top floor of a managers' dormitory. In America, where her two sons are in school, they own a ten-bedroom house in Diamond Bar, California, an affluent cul-de-sac town that is also home to Snoop Dogg.

While Cheung was describing her plan to shore up the business, her husband interrupted. “I have something to add," he said softly. "Recently, many people came to knock on our doors. So I say, if things are as bad for us as the press is saying, why are they still thinking of buying us? If I have a cold and am really sick, why do you still want to sit right next to me?"

"It means we're still very attractive!" Cheung said, and she howled at her own joke.

Cheung was born into a military family, the eldest of eight children. Her parents named her Xiuhua, a revolutionary-era catchphrase meaning "excellent China." She later swapped it for Yan, a more contemporary name. (She also goes by Zhang Yin, the Mandarin version of Cheung Yan.) She grew up in the coal-mining city of Jixi, which lies so far north-east -- north of Vladivostok -- that its inhabitants take a steely pride in being the first Chinese to see the sunrise.

Conditions were austere; the family ate meat only on holidays. Cheung's father, Zhang De En, had been a company commander in the Red Army, but during the Cultural Revolution he was branded a "rightist" and jailed for three years. Cheung rarely mentions this, and only to explain why she never went to college. She said, "I had eight brothers and sisters and my dad was in prison, so I went out to work when I was young, because my brothers and sisters were even younger." She added, "It taught me never to retreat, even if things are getting very tough, and that is something I would never have learned in college."

As the oldest child, Cheung cultivated a sense of discipline and rigor, according to her sister Zhang Xiubo. "There is nothing my sister hates more than lazy people," Zhang Xiubo told a Chinese interviewer. "We obey her unconditionally."

When Cheung was in her late teens, the family moved south, to a city in coastal Guangdong Province. At the time, China had recently begun its experiments with the free market. She found work as a bookkeeper in a fabric factory, and studied accounting at a trade school. She then moved to a bigger company to run the accounting and trade departments, which afforded her a good salary and contacts in Hong Kong. While working in the trade department, she befriended an older paper-mill boss from the northern province of Liaoning, who proposed that she move to Hong Kong, in order to get into the wastepaper trade. "I'm thinking, I'm going to go to such a cosmopolitan place to scavenge through trash heaps?" she recalled. "But he said, 'Don't look down on wastepaper. Wastepaper is a forest.' So now I think that old guy was pretty clever."

By the time Cheung was twenty-eight, she had saved thirty thousand yean (about eight thousand dollars), and she moved to Hong Kong. She met two partners and they formed a company, Ying Gang Shen, to ship wastepaper up the coast to Chinese paper mills. "She was shrewd, very gutsy, willing to learn," Ng Waitang, one of her former partners, recalled when I visited him at the trash yard that he runs in an industrial stretch of Hong Kong. More important, Cheung brought the pivotal asset: the paper mill in Liaoning, which promised to buy whatever they collected.

Ng, a thick, genial man with pillowy bags under his eyes, marvelled at Cheung's audacious charm, even when it seemed excessive. "We were three equal partners, but, in the beginning, she always picked up the check at meals," he said. That embarrassed us, so eventually we started splitting the checks equally." The partners set up shop in a bare four-hundred-square-foot office. They received an early lesson in surviving a business infested with corruption. "People would try to sell you wet paper or moldy paper that's not usable. It is heavier, so they make more money," Ng explained, as a fork loader rumbled past the office door. "After a while, you figure out who is good and who is not, who you can trust and who you can't." As in America, the Hong Kong waste-management business was dogged by organized crime, the syndicates known in China as Triads. "They would come and threaten us," Ng said. "But I would tell them, 'Go ahead and bum the place down! I work for a mainland company, so I don't care. I just get a salary.' They were all threats, no action."

China's new industries had a seemingly bottomless appetite for recyclable paper, and, after two years, Cheung headed to the mainland in search of more. But Chinese paper wasn't good for recycling; it relied heavily on vegetable sources, because the nation had been especially short of trees since the nineteen-fifties, when industrialization campaigns denuded the landscape. Instead, Cheung resolved to try the place known in the trash world as "the Saudi Arabia of scrap": the United States.

Americans use about thirty million tons of containerboard each year, more than any other kind of paper, and enough to cover every inch of the state of Massachusetts, with some left over. The material is made from trees and from what papermakers call O.C.C., for "old corrugated containers." Around three-quarters of all O.C.C. in America gets sifted from the trash and recycled, and that posed the ultimate target for Cheung's business. She arrived in Los Angeles in 1990, accompanied by Liu Ming Chung, whom she had met while working in Hong Kong. Although he was of Taiwanese origin, he spoke English with a Latin-American accent, because he had grown up in Brazil, where his parents worked as grocers. When they met, Liu thought, This is a beautiful girl. And very, very smart At Cheung's suggestion, he gave up dentistry for the paper business, and they went to America, where they married. (Cheung had a son from a previous marriage that had ended in divorce.) Together, they founded a company called America Chung Nam, which is Cantonese for America South China. They rented an apartment in Monterey Park, an area with a large concentration of Chinese immigrants; the apartment served as both office and home. "I was really happy in the early days of starting the business, no matter how hard it was," Cheung said. "At least we worked hard together." Their meagre business consumed only a few hours of the day. "My wife still remembers how I cooked fried beet for her," Liu said. "She says the last time I did that was seventeen years ago." These days, their offices are on different floors of the corporate tower, in public they refer to each other as "Chief Liu" and "the Chairlady." "At this stage, both of us are so busy we hardly do things together," Cheung told me. "So I'm delighted if we are simply on the same flight."

The new partners set out in search of scrap yards that were willing to sell to strangers. "They came knocking on our door -- a cold call," David Cho, the chief financial officer of Bestway Recycling, in Los Angeles, told me. "They came together, in an old red Cadillac, but the initial impression was very positive. They were earnest." Not every deal went so smoothly. They had to fight their way in," Maurice (Big Мое) Colontonio, a paper recycler in South Jersey, told me. Colontonio is a fit and energetic man in his late fifties, with deep-set eyes and a lantern jaw, which give him a resemblance to Joe Tone, the baseball manager. His business, Tab Paper Recycling, works what could be called the Greater Atlantic City area, from a plant opposite a casino-supply outlet in the town of West Berlin.

“The Chinese came to us packers, and they said, “Will you sell to us?" Colontonio told me one afternoon as we sat in the plant office. "But it was always an old-boy network in this business. I sold to someone I knew, and that person sold to people he knew. And now we've got these people -- we don't know them -- and they're selling to China? How are we going to be paid? Who are we going to chase?"

In the years since, American paper mills have closed in large numbers, but recyclers like Colontonio have thrived, thanks largely to foreign demand. Мое -- the son and grandson of "glorified trash-men," as he puts it -- learned to ski in Aspen and to yacht in the Chesapeake. (He recently upgraded from a forty-six-foot yacht to a fifty-foot vessel, which he christened Paradise П.) After dinner at a nouveau-Italian place nearby, Colontonio steered his GMC Yukon Hybrid into the parking lot at Wal-Mart and around back to the superstore's trash yard, which had been fenced off to keep scrap thieves away. "Let's get out of the car," he said. "We're not going to get locked up. I know all the cops in this town,"

The wastepaper had been lashed into boulder-size bundles known as "sandwich bales," the kind that Colontonios guys collect and break open, in order to fish out the rotting garbage, which professionals call "organic." The smell was powerful, but Colontonio looked pleased to have brought me to the front lines of his business. The sandwich bales formed a wall of crushed cardboard boxes, each marked with a brand name -- d-CON mouse traps, Kit Kat candy -- packed layer upon layer, a geological record of modem New Jersey. More than half of it will end up in China. "We have become a country of purchasers, not manufacturers," Colontonio said.

(…)

Before lunch, Cheung had been meeting with yet another in a stampede of bankers. She and her husband were counting down the days until Thanksgiving, which they planned to spend with their children in America. “Both the kids, they don't really have feelings towards Chinese New Year's anymore. So I have to go back for Thanksgiving”, Cheung said. Her older son is in New York, where he is earning a master's degree in engineering at Columbia. The younger son attends a boarding school in California, and Cheung is determined that he will end up in the Ivy League. At one point during lunch, her assistant passed her a copy of a college recommendation that a teacher had recently written on her son's behalf. She fell silent to study it and then passed it back.

“His G.P.A. is 4.0 to 4.3,” she announced to the table. Then, with the pride of an autodidact, she added, “His head is full of American education. He needs to accept some Chinese education as well. Otherwise, he'll be out of balance.” The company's problems were no secret to her younger son, she said “We talk about how much the stock has dropped. He asks about it, and we discuss it. He'll say, `Hey, oil is realty cheap today!'”

Earlier in the week, Liu had heard from the boss of a neighboring factory, one of the world's largest makers of steel upping containers. It was shutting its plant. Like cardboard boxes, shipping containers were an early economic casualty. Property prices, consumer confidence, and auto sales were all slumping in China, and gallows humor was prevalent among factory owners: get into the pajama business, because before long everyone will be unemployed and spending their days at home.

The larger fact, however, was that the slowdown was also accelerating a change that Chinese leaders and economists had sought for years. They had come to believe that China relied too heavily on factories churning out low-quality exports, which fuel growth but also result in poor working conditions, environmental pollution, and a growing gap between the rich and the poor -- “unsteady, unbalanced, uncoordinated, and unsustainable”, as Premier Wen Jiabao said in March of2007. Chinese leaders wanted to ignite domestic consumption and use the new labor law to bring the sweatshop era to a close. For many factories in Dongguan, evolution will mean adapt or die. Local politicians prefer a more poetic image: “emptying the cage for the new birds”.

But the slowdown was also politically precarious: cut back too fast and unemployment could lead to political unrest. "So far, there haven't been large-scale layoffs," Jiang Ling, a vice-mayor of Dongguan, told me when I visited him at city hall. But when I walked out of the building that day four middle-aged women with tanned laborers' faces were clamoring, dashing through the topiaries toward the building's front door. When security guards pushed them back, they sat down in the shrubbery and refused to budge. The young guard tasked with shooing me away told me that the women were shouting for greater welfare provisions from city hall.

The question of what will become of Dongguan is difficult to separate from the question of what will become of Cheung. The city is home to thousands of factories that are based on an outmoded business model, rooted in cheap, unprotected labor and thin margins. China would not be what it is today without them, but it's not yet dear who among them is prepared to splash out of the primordial free market into a new age. Closing the income divide is no longer an abstraction: life expectancy in the poor province of Guizhou is now a decade shorter than it is in Beijing; a child born on the remote Qinghai Plateau is seven times more likely to die than a child born in the capital Even some of China's most energetic cheerleaders of the free market sense the passing of an era. In a recent article on Cheung Van, the magazine China Entrepreneur declared, “In Chinese society five years ago, maybe a company that had achieved success in business, while not being perfect in other respects, would have been tolerated and worshipped. But things have changed”.

I mentioned to Cheung and Liu that I had spent time the previous afternoon in the nearby village of Da Sheng, where many of their employees lived. The town square looked like a meeting of rival armies. Each worker was color-coded by location in the factory food chain: blue coveralls for production workers, orange smocks for power-plant staff, and mint-green uniforms for the handlers of wastepaper. A production worker told me that the rumor around the factory was that it might be bankrupt in a month or two. Cheung lowered her chopsticks for a moment. She seemed irritated. “It's very strange that an employee would say that,” she said. “These days, there are people out there who don't even have food to eat! But we haven't withheld any salaries. Nobody has gone unpaid.” She seemed less bothered by the rumor than by its implied allowance of failure, its apostasy. She was quiet for a moment, and then she said, “Some people are living in such good fortune that they don't know what fortune is anymore.”

By the beginning of this year, Cheung's decision to halt construction and to repay loans ahead of schedule seemed to have improved the company's prospects. Mark Chang, of Merrill Lynch -- which has since been acquired by Bank of America -- told me in an e-mail mat the risk of failure “seems to be much lower now.” Chinese leaders were helping, too: the economy was souring so fast that they had decided not to let too many birds leave the cage at once. They have suspended mini-mum-wage increases and restored tax rebates to help some exporters, all aimed at preventing mass layoffs. On February 18th, Nine Dragons released a six-month financial summary that showed that its net profit had dropped 70.3 per cent compared with the same period in the previous year. Cheung said the company had faced a "bleak winter" but thanked government officials, banks, investors, and others for staying supportive. Nine Dragons, it seemed, had become "too big to fail," said Kary Sei, an analyst at ICEA Finance Holdings, in Hong Kong,

At one point during our lunch, I asked Cheung if she still hoped to be the world's largest cardboard-maker. She smiled, and answered, "I don't think it's my goal to be № 1 in the world. What matters to me most is this market" She gestured around her, at China. Outside the cafeteria, we could hear the sound of semitrucks on the rutted road leading to the factory. And from the window the red-and-white striped smokestack of the company's power plant was visible, towering above everything around it.

Fruit was served, and Cheung attacked a small pile of longans, pulling them from their skins, one at a time. Perhaps it was fatigue, but, as she ate, her usually impregnable optimism seemed muted. "I think the market is going down so fast that some won't be able to turn it around," she said. She went on, "This time is really different. Large and small are all affected. In the past, the big waves would only wash away the sand and leave the rocks. Now the waves are so big, even some racks are being washed away."

An audio interview with Evan Osnos

ANNALS OF HUMAN RIGHTS

HELLHOLE

The United States holds tens of thousands of inmates in long term solitary confinement. Is this torture?

Human beings are social creatures. We are social not just in the trivial sense that we like company, and not just in the obvious sense that we each depend on others. We are social in a more elemental way: simply to exist as a normal human being requires interaction with other people.

Children provide the clearest demonstration of this fact, although it was slow to be accepted. Well into the nineteen-fifties, psychologists were encouraging parents to give children less attention and affection, in order to encourage independence. Then Harry Harlow, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, produced a series of influential studies involving baby rhesus monkeys.

He happened upon the findings in the mid-fifties, when he decided to save money for his primate-research laboratory by breeding his own lab monkeys instead of importing them from India. Because he didn't know how to raise infant monkeys, he cared for them the way hospitals of the era cared for human infants -- in nurseries, with plenty of food, warm blankets, some toys, and in isolation from other infants to prevent the spread of infection. The monkeys grew up sturdy, disease-free, and larger than those from the wild. Yet they were also profoundly disturbed, given to staring blankly and rocking in place for long periods, circling their cages repetitively, and mutilating themselves.

At first, Harlow and his graduate-students couldn't figure out what the problem was. They considered factors such as diet, patterns of light exposure, even the antibiotics they used. Then, as Deborah Blum recounts in a fascinating biography of Harlow, “Love at Goon Park”, one of his researchers noticed how tightly the monkeys clung to their soft blankets. Harlow wondered whether what the monkeys were missing in their isolettes was a mother. So, in an odd experiment, he gave them an artificial one.

In the studies, one artificial mother was a doll made of terry cloth; the other was made of wire. He placed a warming device inside the dolls to make them seem more comforting. The babies, Harlow discovered, largely ignored the wire mother. But they became deeply attached to the cloth mother. They caressed it. They slept curled up on it. They ran to it when frightened. They refused replacements: they wanted only “their” mother. If sharp spikes were made to randomly thrust out of the mother s body when the rhesus babies held it, they waited patiently for the spikes to recede and returned to clutching it. No matter how tightly they clung to the surrogate mothers, however, the monkeys remained psychologically abnormal.

In a later study on the effect of total isolation from birth, the researchers found that the test monkeys, upon being released into a group of ordinary monkeys, “usually go into a state of emotional shock, characterized by ... autistic self-clutching and rocking.” Harlow noted, “One of six monkeys isolated for three months refused to eat after release and died five days later”. After several weeks in the company of other monkeys, most of them adjusted -- but not those who had been isolated for longer periods. “Twelve months of isolation almost obliterated the animals socially,” Harlow wrote. They became permanently withdrawn, and they lived as outcasts -- regularly set upon, as if inviting abuse.

The research made Harlow famous (and infamous, too -- revulsion at his work helped spur the animal-rights movement). Other psychologists produced evidence of similarly deep and sustained damage in neglected and orphaned children. Hospitals were made to open up their nurseries to parents. And it became widely accepted that children require nurturing human beings not just tor food and protection but also for the normal functioning of their body. We have been hesitant to apply these lessons to adults. Adults, after all, are fully formed, independent beings, with internal strengths and knowledge to draw upon. We wouldn't have anything like a child's dependence on other people, right? Yet it seems that we do. We don't have a lot of monkey experiments to call upon here. But mankind has produced tens of thousands of human ones, including in our prison system. And the picture that has emerged is profoundly unsettling.

Among our most benign experiments are those with people who voluntarily isolate themselves for extended periods. Long-distance solo sailors, for instance, commit themselves to months at sea. They face all manner of physical terrors: thrashing storms, fifty-foot waves, leaks, illness. Yet, for many, the single most overwhelming difficulty they report is the "soul-destroying loneliness," as one sailor called it. Astronauts have to be screened for their ability to tolerate long stretches in tightly confined isolation, and they come to depend on radio and video communications for social contact.

The problem of isolation goes beyond ordinary loneliness, however. Consider what we've learned from hostages who have been held in solitary confinement -- from the journalist Terry Anderson, for example, whose extraordinary memoir, "Den of Lions," recounts his seven years as a hostage of Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Anderson was the chief Middle Last correspondent for the Associated Press when, on March 16, 1985, three bearded men forced him from his car in Beirut at gunpoint. He was pushed into a Mercedes sedan, covered head to toe with a heavy blanket, and made to crouch head down in the footwell behind the front seat. His captors drove him to a garage, pulled him out of the car, put a hood over his head, and bound his wrists and ankles with tape. For half an hour, they grilled him for the name of other Americans in Beirut, but he gave no names and they did not beat him or press him further. They threw him in the trunk of the car, drove him to another building, and put him in what would be the first of 2 succession of cells across Lebanon. He was soon placed in what seemed to be a dusty closet, large enough for only a mattress. Blindfolded, he could make out the distant sounds of other hostages. (One we William Buckley; the C.I.A. station chief who was kidnapped and tortured repeatedly until he weakened and died.) Peering around his blindfold, Anderson could see a bare light bulb dangling from the ceiling. He received three unpalatable meals a day - usually a sandwich of bread and cheese, or cold rice with canned vegetables, or soup. He bad a bottle tо urinate in and was allowed one five- to ten-minute trip each day so a rotting bathroom to empty his bowels and wash with water at a dirty sink. Otherwise, the only reprieve from isolation came when the guards made short visits to bark at him for breaking a rule or to threaten him, sometimes with a gun at his temple.

He missed people terribly, especially his fiancй and his family. He was despondent and depressed. Then, with time, he began to feel something more. He felt himself disintegrating. It was as if his brain were grinding down. A month into his confinement, he rcalled in his memoir, “The mind is a blank. Jesus, I always thought I was smart. Where are all the things I learned, the books I read, the poems I memorized? There's nothing there, just a formless, gray-black misery. My mind's gone dead. God, help me.”

He was stiff from lying in bed day and night, yet tired all the rime. He dozed off and on constantly, sleeping twelve hours a day. He craved activity of almost any kind. He would watch the daylight wax and wane on the ceiling, or roaches creep slowly up the wall. He had a Bible and tried to read, but he often found that he lacked the concentration to do so. He observed himself becoming neurotically possessive about his little space, at times putting his life in jeopardy by flying into a rage if a guard happened to step on his bed. He brooded incessantly, thinking back on all the mistakes he'd made in fife, his regrets, his offenses against God and family.

His captors moved him every few months. For unpredictable stretches of time, he was granted the salvation of a companion -- sometimes he shared a cell with as many as four other hostages -- and he noticed that his thinking recovered rapidly when this occurred He could read and concentrate longer, avoid hallucinations, and better control his emotions. “I would rather have had the worst companion than no compassion at all,” he noted.

In September, 1986, after several months of sharing a cell with another hostage, Anderson was, for no reason, returned to solitary confinement, by this time in a six-by-six-foot cell, with no windows, and light from only a fluorescent lamp in an outside corridor. The guards refused 10 say how long he would be there. After a few weeks he felt his mind stepping away again.

“I find myself trembling sometimes for no reason,” he wrote. “I'm afraid I'm beginning to lose my mind, to lose control completely”.

One day, three years into his ordeal he snapped. He walked over to a wall and began beating his forehead against it, dozens of times. His head was smashed and bleeding before the guards were able to stop him.

Some hostages fared worse. Anderson told the story of Frank Reed, a fifty-four-year-old American private-school director who was taken hostage and held in solitary confinement for four months before being put in with Anderson. By then, Reed had become severely withdrawn. He lay motionless for hours facing a wall, semi-catatonic. He could not follow the guards' simplest instructions. This invited abuse from them, in much the same way that once isolated rhesus monkeys seemed to invite abuse from the colony. Released after three and a half years, Reed ultimately required admission to a psychiatric hospital.

“It's an awful thing, solitary,” John McCain wrote of his five and a half years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam -- more than two years of it spent in isolation in a fifteen-by-fifteen-foot sell, unable to communicate with other P.O.W.s except by tap code, secreted notes, or by speaking into an enamel cup pressed against the wall. “It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment”. And this comes from a man who was beaten rregularly; denied adequate medical treatment for two broken arms, a broken leg, and chronic dysentery; and tortured to the point of having an arm broken again. A U.S. military study of almost a hundred and fifty naval aviators returned from imprisonment in Vietnam, many of whom were treated even worse than McCain, reported that they found social isolation to be as torturous and agonizing as any physical abuse they suffered.

And what happened to them was physical. EEG studies going back to the nineteen sixties have shown diffuse slowing of brain waves in prisoners alter a week or more of solitary confinement. In 1992, fifty-seven prisoners of war, released after an average of six months in detention camps in the former Yugoslavia, were examined using EEC-like tests. The recordings revealed brain abnormalities months afterward; the most severe were found in prisoners who had endured either head trauma sufficient to render them unconscious or, yes, solitary confinement. Without sustained social interaction, the human brain may become as impaired as one that has incurred a traumatic injury.

ПРИЛОЖЕНИЕ 2.

СПИСОК ПРИМЕРОВ, ИСПОЛЬЗОВАННЫХ В РАБОТЕ, И ИХ ПЕРЕВОД.

1. It looks paradoxical that certain banking institutions receiving Federal aid look with a fishy eye at the new Home Owners Loan Corporation. (NYT NYT - The New York Times) - Парадоксальным кажется то, что некоторые банковские учреждения, получая федеральные субсидии, без энтузиазма относится к новой корпорации кредитования домовладельцев.

2. A bill creating a 'rainy day fund' to cover budget deficits in Nevada's K-12 school system was debated Monday by Senate Finance Committee members. (USAT USAT - The USA Today) - В понедельник члены финансового комитета Сената обсуждали законопроект о создании резервного фонда для покрытия бюджетного дефицита в системе полного среднего образования в штате Невада.

3. 1 million euro for a bottle of fire water - a Mexican businessman hopes to get that much for an exclusive bottle of tequila. (WSJ^{WSJ - The Wall Street Journal}) - Миллион евро за огненную воду - именно столько намерен получить предприимчивый мексиканский бизнесмен за бутылку с текилой.

4. It he is caught, there will be plenty of charges for him to answer and he will certainly get into hot water. (NYT) - Если его арестуют, ему предъявят много обвинений, и тогда-то он действительно будет в беде.