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  3. Last spring, Bhairavi Desai, a middle-aged woman without a driver’s license

Last spring, Bhairavi Desai, a middle-aged woman without a driver’s license

游客2023-12-28  17
问题     Last spring, Bhairavi Desai, a middle-aged woman without a driver’s license and thus an unlikely leader for thousands of mostly male drivers in the world’s largest market for hired vehicles, delivered emotional testimony in front of New York City’s Taxi & Limousine Commission about the mounting existential difficulties in her field.
    The executive director of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, Ms. Desai had been a labor activist for 21 years but she had never seen anything like the despair she was witnessing now—the bankruptcies, foreclosures and eviction notices plaguing drivers who were calling her with questions about how to navigate homelessness and paralyzing depression.
    "Half my heart is just crushed, " she said, "and the other half is on fire."
    The economic hardship that Uber and its competitors had inflicted on conventional drivers in New York and London and other cities had become overwhelming. For decades there had been no more than 12,000 to 13,000 taxis in New York but now there were myriad new ways to avoid public transportation, in some cases with ride-hailing services like Via that charged little more than $5 to travel in Manhattan.
    While Uber has sold that "disruption" as positive for riders, for many taxi workers, it has been devastating. The gross annual bookings of full-time yellow-taxi drivers in New York declined and their annual salary fell from $88,000 a year to just over $69,000.
    Medallions, which grant the right to operate a taxi in New York City, were now depreciating assets and drivers who had borrowed money to pay for them, once a sound investment strategy, were deeply in debt. Ms. Desai was routinely seeing grown men cry and she had become increasingly concerned about the possibility that they would begin taking their lives.
    For taxi drivers staring down an even bleaker future of driverless cars at a moment when Washington considers a weekly paycheck bump of $1.50 an occasion to break out the layer cake, it is hard to see where the metaphoric Prozac will come from.
    The problems facing the city’s taxi drivers have become so bad, Ms. Desai said, that even on New Year’s Eve many complained that they roamed around unable to pick up fares. At about that time she had received a call from a woman who runs a community radio station in the Bronx, with an audience made up mostly of Dominican livery drivers. Two drivers that the host knew of had killed themselves and other drivers were on the show talking about the isolation and fear they saw all around them.
    Doug Schifter, a livery driver in his early 60s, killed himself with a shotgun in front of City Hall in Lower Manhattan. In the days preceding his death, Mr. Schifter wrote a lengthy Facebook post laying out the structural cruelties that had left him in such dire circumstance. He had lost his health insurance and accrued credit card debt and he would no longer work for "chump change, " preferring, he said, to die in the hope that his sacrifice would draw attention to what drivers, too often unable to feed their families now, were enduring.
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答案     贝拉维.德赛(Bhairavi Desai)是一住没有驾驶执照的中年妇女，因此在这个全球最大的汽车租赁市场上，她看起来并不像是一个领导了数千名司机(大多为男性)的人。去年春天，她在纽约市出租车和豪华轿车委员会(Taxi & Limousine Commission)面前，动情地讲述了自己的领域所面临的日益严峻的生存困境。
    任纽约出租车工人联盟(New York Taxi Workers Alliance)执行董事的21年里，德赛女士一直是维护劳工权益的积极分子，但她从未见过如今这样绝望的情景——破产、丧失抵押品赎回权和驱逐通知令司机们痛苦不堪，他们打电话询问她如何解决无家可归和令人绝望的抑郁问题。
    “我的心一半碎了，”她说，“另一半在燃烧。”优步(Uber)及其竞争对手的发展使得纽约、伦敦和其他城市的传统司机面临难以承受的经济困境。几十年来，纽约的出租车数量一直不超过1.2万至1.3万辆，但现在乘客有了无数避开公共交通的新方法。有时像维亚(Via)这样的叫车服务在曼哈顿市内的收费仅略高于5美元。
    尽管优步宣扬其“对行业传统的颠覆”对乘客有益，但对于很多出租车司机来说，这是毁灭性的打击。纽约黄色出租车全职司机全年订单总量下降，他们的年收入从8.8万美元降至略高于6.9万美元。授予纽约市出租车经营权的出租车牌照正在贬值，借钱购买牌照一度被认为是一种明智的投资，如今却使得司机负债累累。德赛女士经常看到成年男子哭泣，她越来越担心他们可能会结束自己的生命。
    出租车司机们正凝视着无人驾驶汽车普及后他们更加黯淡的未来。与此同时，美国政府将每周1.5美元的工资增长视为重大突破，很难看出司机们精神的“百忧解”(Prozac)会从何而来。德赛女士说，该市出租车司机面临的问题已经变得非常严重，甚至在新年前夕，许多人还抱怨说，他们在街上到处转悠也不能接到客人。大约在那个时候，她接到一位女士的电话，这位女士在布朗克斯区(Bronx)经营社区广播电台，她的听众大多为来自多米尼加(Dominican)的出租车司机。主持人认识的2名司机自杀了，而其他司机在节目中谈论他们感受到的孤独和恐惧。
    道格.希夫特(Doug Schifter)是一名60岁出头的出租车司机，他在曼哈顿下城的市政厅前用猎枪自杀了。在他去世前几天，希夫特先生在脸书(Facebook)上发布了一条很长的帖子，条理清晰地讲述了结构性失业的残酷现状使他陷入绝望的境地。他失去了健康保险，信用卡债务也在增加，他再也不会为“少量报酬”工作。他说，他宁愿以自己的牺牲唤起人们关注出租车司机当前所忍受的境遇，他们现在往往已经无法养活自己的家庭。
解析     1.第1段形容词emotional意为“易激动的”，在翻译时可将其词性转换成副词，译为“动情地”，使译文更加流畅。
    2.第1段句子较长，其中Bhairavi Desai的同位语较长，这部分主要是介绍德赛女士的职业，在翻译时可将这部分拆分出来，独立成句，放至句首，作为背景信息。
    3.第2段navigate为多义词，有“驾驶”“解决”等义项。该段主要介绍传统的士司机们所处的困境，因此navigate在此应该是向女士寻求“解决”办法的意思，所以navigate选择“解决”这个释义更为合适。
    4.第2段句子较长，其中破折号之后的内容介绍了司机们面临的绝望情景，在翻译时可将这部分拆分出来，独立成句。
    5.第8段第二句lay out为固定搭配，意为“清楚而仔细地提出计划、论点等”，故可译作“条理清晰地讲述……”。
    6.第8段第三句chump change为固定搭配，意为“少量的没有什么价值的钱”，结合本文语境，可译作“少量报酬”。
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