The Lady of the Lamp Shines Even Brighter

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You walk along a major road amid fumes and thundering traffic before taking a right turn down a ramp into the car park of St Thomas’ Hospital and there is the building you are looking for – the Florence Nightingale Museum. Next week, to mark the centenary of her death at the age of 90, this museum reopens after a major seven-month overhaul.

Who was this heroic Victorian campaigner, this secular saint who, as «the lady of the lamp» became a living legend? We may have been familiar from childhood with the romantic story of the woman who paced the wards of the Crimea’s makeshift hospitals, battling the obstructive officials of the British army in her fight to ensure that the wounded would be given proper nursing care, but this part of her life was merely the prelude to a much more significant postwar career in which she carved out a pioneering role as a public health reformer, modernising nursing systems and advising the government on matters of health both in Britain and in the outposts of empire.

The museum is tiny, but it feels a bit like a Tardis: it throws open the door onto an expansive view. Organised in three sections that look, in turn, at her youth, her time in the Crimea and her late career, the museum offers atmospherically distinct displays, each of which takes a single iconic object as a centrepoint from which visitors start to explore the ideas that circle around them.

As the spectator moves through displays placing an audioguide shaped like a stethoscope peering into glass cabinets to discover her religious inspirations or how she set up a banking system so that soldiers could send their pay home — a whole world comes to life.

It becomes even more vividly real in the context of the images and film clips that ribbon the outer walls. These stir in the spectator a sense of ongoing problems: of “super-bugs” in hospitals, of neglected troops in Afghanistan, of rising mortality rates among mothers in the developing world. The iconic lamp, which stands at the heart of this museum still burns like a beacon in our modern world.

From «Times Online»

May 3, 2010

Приложение 2

Выполните предпереводческий анализ текста, определив его источник, жанр, тематику, грамматические, лексико-стилистические и прагматические трудности. Выполните перевод текста на русский язык, сравните и обсудите полученные варианты перевода, прокомментируйте эвристический подход к переводу текста, проведите коррекцию ошибок, обоснуйте свое мнение.

Вариант 1

Robert O'Hara Burke

Robert O'Hara Burke, the Irishman, was the first European to cross AustraliafromMelbourne to the Gulf of Carpentaria. He was more of an adventurer than an explorer and may have taken the job of leading the 1860 expedition because of a failed love affair or for the money. Burke's expedition was the largest and most expensive ever organized in Australia. He took fifteen men with him; his second-in-command William Wills, a twenty-six year old Englishman, was the most loyal. Both men died before they could claim their prize for crossing the continent.

Cooper's Creek, more a waterhole than a stream, was the meeting point for Burke's expedition, and the place where it met its tragic end.

Вариант 2

Leonardo da Vinci

The Renaissance ideal of the universal man was realized in Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). In him, scientific curiosity and powerful intelligence were allied with love of nature and a deep feeling for the mysteries of the universe. By his own account engineer, scientist, musician, painter and sculptor, Leonardo studied everything, from the movement of water to the internal complexities of the human body; he made designs for flying machines, dams, buildings, siege machines, all sketched and described in his notebooks. He painted what has become the most famous picture in the world — the Mona Lisa, the woman who sits, smiling mysteriously, before a melting landscape of rocks and water.

Вариант 3

Where do Languages Come from?

In the 1700s, philologists began to compare languages. They already knew that French, Spanish, Italian and other languages from the area once occupied by the Roman Empire are all descended from Latin. Their studies showed that there were striking similarities between these languages and many other languages throughout Europe and Asia, including Sanskrit, the oldest language of India.

They concluded that all these Indo-European languages were descended from a language called Proto-Indo-European. This is now thought to have been spoken by a group of semi-nomadic people who lived in southern Russia 6000 years ago. Scientists then worked out a complete family tree to show how it evolved.

Вариант 4

On the Way to Disarmament

Upon the end of World War I, the international climate was more receptive to the idea of arms control. The Treaty of Versailles, signed at the end of the war, virtually disarmed Germany. During the years between World Wars I and II, many arms-control conferences were held and many treaties were drawn up.

The Covenant (договор, устав) of the League of Nations established criteria for reducing world armaments. The League's Council was to establish reasonable limits on the military forces of each country. Members of the League were also called upon to limit the private manufacture of arms and to exchange information on the size and status of their military establishments and arms industries.

[Миньяр-Белоручева А.П., Миньяр-Белоручева Н.В. Английский язык (учебник устного перевода). М., 2004]

Приложение 3

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Hollywood is a district in Los Angeles, California, U.S.A., situated west-northwest of Downtown. Due to its fame and cultural identity as the historical center of movie studios and stars, the word "Hollywood" is often used as a metonym for the American film and television industry. Today much of the movie industry has dispersed into surrounding areas such as Burbank and the Westside, but significant ancillary industries remain in Hollywood.

Many historic Hollywood theaters are used as venues (площадка, место проведения) to premiere major theatrical releases (показ отснятой на пленку театральной постановки), and host the Academy Awards. It is a popular destination for nightlife and tourism, and home to the Walk of Fame.

In the early 1900s, motion picture production companies from New York and New Jersey started moving to California because of the reliable weather. Although electric lights existed at that time, none were powerful enough to adequately expose film; the best source of illumination for movie production was natural sunlight. Besides the moderate, dry climate, they were also drawn to the state because of its open spaces and wide variety of natural scenery which could, of course, come in handy during film-making. Another factor in Hollywood's development was its great distance from New Jersey, which made it more difficult for Thomas Edison to enforce his motion picture patents. At the time, Edison owned almost all of the patents relevant to motion picture production and, in the East, movie producers acting independently of Edison's Motion Picture Patents Company were often sued or enjoined by Edison and his agents. Thus, movie makers working on the West Coast could work unencumbered by Edison's control. If Edison sent agents to California, word would usually reach Los Angeles before the agents' arrival and the movie makers could simply escape to nearby Mexico.

In early 1910, director D. W. Griffith was sent by the Biograph Company to the west coast with his acting troop consisting of actors Blanche Sweet, Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, Lionel Barrymore, and others. They started filming on a vacant lot near Georgia Street in Downtown Los Angeles. The Company decided to explore new territories and traveled several miles north to a little village that was friendly and enjoyed the movie company filming there. This place was called "Hollywood". D. W. Griffith then filmed the first movie ever shot in Hollywood called In Old California, a Biograph melodrama about Latino/Mexican-occupied California in the 1800s. Biograph stayed there for months and made several films before returning to New York. After hearing about this wonderful place, in 1913 many movie-makers headed west. With this film, the movie industry was "born" in Hollywood which soon became the movie capital of the world.

Hollywood and the movie industry of the 1930s are described in P. G. Wodehouse's novel Laughing Gas (1936) and in Budd Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run? (1941), and is parodied in Terry Pratchett's novel Moving Pictures (1990), which is a takeoff of Singin' in the Rain.

From about 1930, five major Hollywoodmovie studiosfrom all over the Los Angeles area owned large, grand theaters throughout the country for the exhibition of their movies. The period between the years 1927 (the effective end of the silent era) to 1948 is considered the age of the "Hollywood studio system", or, in a more common term, the Golden Age of Hollywood. In a landmark 1948 court decision, the United States Supreme Court ruled that movie studios could not own theaters and play only the movies produced by their studios and only with their movie stars. With that, an era of Hollywood history had unofficially ended. By the mid-1950s, when television proved a profitable enterprise that was here to stay, movie studios started to produce programming in that TV, which is still the norm today.

(From an article on the history of Hollywood: www.wikipedia.org )