Unit4-交大工程硕士英语课文翻译第四课.doc

Unit 4 Downsizing1. The e-mail looked harmless enough. Be at the Renaissance Austin Hotel, 20 minutes away, in about an hour. Just another stupid meeting, no doubt. But by the time Dell information technology specialist Chuck Peterson walked into a room filled with 75 of his co-workers and a few managers he had never seen before, he knew what was up. “None of them would look at us,” he says. “They had their backs to us or they were looking at their feet.”这封邮件看上去不足以造成伤害（email跟主题有什么关系？）。会议是在Renaissance Austin旅馆召开的，到旅馆的距离是20分钟，会议在一个小时后召开（20 minutes away,in about an hourr如何理解，补全成分应该怎样？）。毫无疑问，又是一个愚蠢的会议。但是，当戴尔的信息技术专家Chuck Peterson走进房间时，他便知道即将发生什么，房间里是他的75个同事和几个他以前没见过的经理。他说：没有人愿意看我们，他们背对我们或是低着头。2. The bosses stuck to their script. The economy is bad. We cant afford to keep you. So were not. Hand in your badges on the way out. There were no individual explanations for why these workers out of a work force of 40,000 had been picked. The members of the firing squad never even introduced themselves. It was over in eight minutes.老板们按照他们准备的讲稿读。经济不景气，我们承担不起继续雇用你们的开支。所以我们不再雇你们。出去的时候交出你们的公司证件。对于为什么从4万名员工中选择这些人，没有做单独的解释。“行刑队”成员甚至没有介绍他们自己。一切都在八分钟之内完成。(八分钟内就全部结束)3. Peterson, 40, is one of 1,700 full-time Dell workers who lost their jobs since February, in an economy that has been shedding 100,000 workers a month since the beginning of the year. Last week Winstar Communications, once a wireless wonder, hung up on 2,000 employees 44% of its staff. TiVo, Sycamore Networks and Extreme Networks added more bodies to the tech sectors growing pile. AOL Time Warner has announced 2,400 job cuts in response to the slowing economy and pressure from Wall Street. By weeks end unemployment had hit 4.3%, a slight but ominous rise. Worse, job creation was down, more evidence that recession is at hand.Peterson，40岁，是自二月份以来戴尔裁掉的1700名全职员工中的一员，这是发生在年初的头一个月就已经裁员10万人这样的经济状况下的。上周，一度是无线行业中奇迹的温斯达通讯公司暂时解雇了2000名员工，占公司员工总数的44%。TiVo公司，美国光纤网络公司和极进网络公司也加入了科技界裁员大军之中。美国在线时代华纳集团宣布削减2400个工作岗位以响应缓慢的经济增长和来自华尔街的压力。截止到周末，失业率已经达到4.3%，涨幅虽小（虽然很小）却是一个不详的预兆。更糟糕的是，工作机会在减少，越来越多的迹象表明经济衰退即将到来。4. Dells cuts illustrate both the abruptness of the downturn and the almost chaotic nature of todays layoffs, even for companies trying to do right. Dell isnt a Rust Belt dinosaur or a business-plan-and-a-prayer dotcom. Its workers helped write one of the great business success stories of modern times. Dell was founded in 1984 to sell computers without a middleman (Direct from Dell, the ads said). Its hyperefficient model helped it pass Compaq to become North Americas largest PC manufacturer. Nor is Dells good news all behind it. Just last Thursday, Dell almost single-handedly ran the Dow up 400 points when it confirmed that first-quarter profit estimates were on track. Last year the company earned $2.3 billion on sales of $32 billion.戴尔公司的裁员表明突然的经济衰退和如今几乎混乱状况下的裁员，即使是像戴尔这样的公司也是不得不采取的措施。戴尔公司不是一个老工业区的老式公司，也不是一个初具商业理念而满心祈祷着的网络公司。他的员工帮助公司书写(创造)了一个现代社会伟大的商业传奇。戴尔公司成立于1984年，它们不通过中间商销售电脑（广告中说的从戴尔公司直销）。它的这种效率极高的模式使它超过康柏计算机公司成为北美最大的电脑生产商。戴尔公司的好消息远不止于此。就在上周四，当戴尔公司证实第一季度的盈利即将实现（目标可以兑现时），几乎仅此一项就使道琼斯指数上升了400点。去年公司销售业绩为320亿美元，盈利23亿美元。5. Many of the fired workers and their supporters are attacking the cuts as unnecessary and poorly handled and antithetical to the company Michael Dell created. The Dell culture is fiercely meritocratic, with workers expected to do whatever it takes to make the company succeed. The reward: rich option packages that turned many thirtyish tech workers into millionaires or, as Austin calls them, Dellionaires.许多被解雇的员工和他们的支持者都抨击裁员是没有必要的（没有用的）并且处理地十分恶劣，也违背了戴尔公司创建者迈克戴尔的意愿。戴尔公司的文化是严厉的（拼命的）精英领导，他鼓励员工去做任何可以使公司成功的事。回报是一揽子丰富的股权利益，它使许多三十岁左右的技术工作者变成百万富翁，或是（或者）就如奥斯丁人的叫他们戴尔富翁。6. Dell says it did not undertake the cuts lightly. “Its one of the hardest, most gut-wrenching decisions you can make as a leader,” Michael Dell told Time. The layoffs are, he admits, “an admission that we screwed up” by overhiring. If theres a lesson, he says, its that “when things heat up quite a bit, we should take some pause.”戴尔说裁员做起来并不轻松。Michael Dell在时代周刊上说：“作为领导，裁员是最艰难，最令人痛苦的决定之一。”他承认，裁员是由于过度招聘员工而造成的，“我们承认我们弄糟了”。他说，如果说（我们得到了什么）教训，那就是“当事情升温到一定程度，我们必须打住。”7. The company insists it tried to handle the layoffs as humanely as possible. Dell gave terminated workers their yearly bonuses early, and it handed out severance packages of two months salary and two months of insurance coverage. Dell is also paying for job counseling.公司强调他们试着把裁员尽量做得富有人情味。戴尔公司给被解雇的员工提前发放了年终奖金，还支付了两个月的薪水和两个月的保险作为解聘补偿。戴尔公司还支付了就业咨询的费用。8. Not every employee got the bad news as impersonally as Peterson. When senior recruiter Kathleen Sullivan, 47, was let go, her boss led her from her cubicle into a “team room” where they could have some privacy. He apologized profusely and said he hoped they would stay in touch. “Then a tear started rolling down his cheek,” she says. “Im getting laid off, and Im asking him if he needed a Kleenex.并不是每个雇员都像Peterson那样没有人情味地接到解聘的坏消息。当47岁的高级招聘人员Kathleen Sullivan被解雇时，她的老板将其从她的分隔间带入一个套间，在这里他们可以有一些私人空间。他做了很多道歉并说希望能够保持联系。“然后，一滴眼泪滚落到他的脸颊上，”她说，“我是被解雇的人呀，可是我在问他是否要用面巾纸。”9. But the pain was mostly hers. Sullivan had initially resisted going to Dell. But when it recruited her, she was enticed by the high pay, the retirement plan, the stock options and the heady work environment. During the boom, she says, she once hired 600 people in five weeks. Dell hired 16,000 workers in the past two years alone.最痛苦的还是她。最初,Sullivan曾拒绝来戴尔公司。但当戴尔公司招聘她时，高额的报酬、退休方案、股权利益以及令人兴奋的工作环境吸引了她。她说，公司繁荣时期她曾在五周内招了600人。单单在过去的两年间，戴尔公司就招聘16000名员工。10. With money tight, there was pressure to cut back on departments that didnt generate revenueadministration, marketing and recruiting. Dell was also pushing to have in-house managers do more of their own job interviewing, leaving less work for Sullivan. Echoing Michael Dell, Sullivan blames the company for not doing a better job of anticipating work-force needs. “This is the first time I heard about reducing numbers,” she says. “The company was growing too fast, and we didnt take a long view and look at what we had.”随着资金紧张，那些不产生收益的部门，如管理部，市场部和人事部面临被裁减的压力。戴尔公司让各业务部门内部的经理们去做他们职责外的面试工作，留给Sullivan越来越少的工作。回应Michael Dell，Sullivan谴责公司对于员工总数需求的预期（预期的员工总数的计划）工作做的不够好。“我是第一次听说裁员，”她说，“公司增长的太快了，我们没有做好长远打算，也没考虑到我们都有了什么。”11. Gary Davidsons firing was mercifully brief. Davidson, 39, a network administrator in a factory that makes laptops, got to work at 7:30 a.m., and his boss called him into the human-resources building. He was told that he was history and was asked to hand over his badge, cell phone and corporate cards. “They gave me the option of coming back later to clean out my desk,” he says. “By 7:45 a.m., I was out.”Gary Davidson的解雇过程是仁慈的摘要版（十分的）（简短）。39岁的Davidson是一家手提电脑制造厂的网络管理员。他早上7:30上班，老板打来电话叫他去人力资源办公楼。他被告知被解雇了，要求上交公司证章（徽章）、手机和公司卡。“他们给我的选项就是回来清理办公桌，”他说，“早上7:45分，我离开了公司。”12. The news didnt come as a complete shock. When Davidson started out, money ran freely. “The mood was, Gosh, Dell has oodles of loot, ” he says. “ Lets just spend, spend, spend. ” But a year ago, when the dotcom bubble burst, everything changed. It was harder to get anything more than a bare-bones computer to work on, and training was halted for several months. “You could practically hear the screws being tightened（如何翻？）,” says Davidson.解聘这个消息并不是完全让人震惊的。Davidson刚开始工作时，花钱是很自由的。他说：“那心情就是，天呐,戴尔公司这么有钱。我们就花吧，花吧，花吧。”但一年前，当网络泡沫破碎时，一切都变了。工作中除计算机这类基本配置外什么都没了，培训也停了好几个月。“你可以感到公司的资金在收紧。” Davidson说。13. By early this year, rumors were rampant that job cuts were coming. But Dell traditionally kept a 10% to 30% buffer of temps and contractors, who normally get the boot during slow times. The company usually lays off an additional 10% of full-time staff after annual evaluations in February. The regular staff had hoped that those traditional purges, which happened again this year, would be all that were needed.到今年早些时候，关于公司裁员一事已是流言四起。但是, 通常戴尔公司按照传统有占到员工总数的10%至30%的临时工和合同工,这些员工通常会在公司不景气时被辞退。公司一般会在每年二月份的考评后辞退额外10的全日制员工。正式员工曾希望今年的裁员和以往一样，只是裁减临时工和合同工就可以了。（？）14. Many of the fired workers object to the way they were let go. Just days before D-day, as Feb. 15 is now known at Dell, management was denying planned job cuts. On D-day, officers from the Texas Department of Public Safety showed up at the Dell campus to escort the doomed to their cars. Workers were encouraged to sign “the bribe,” an agreement not to discuss their packager or sue Dell, in exchange for up to four extra weeks of severance.许多被解雇员工反对他们被解雇的方式。就在2月15号，现在戴尔公司众所周知的D-day（裁员）的前几天，管理部门否认计划裁员。在D-day（正式裁员日），德克萨斯州公共安全部警员出现在戴尔办公楼，由他们护送这批注定被解雇的（遭受厄运的）员工上车。公司鼓励被解雇员工签署一项“贿赂收买”协议，该协议中要求他们不将解聘的补偿金告诉他人或是不准备起诉戴尔公司，作为交换，戴尔提供给他们高达解聘前四周的工资的补偿金。15. One of the biggest complaints among redundant Dell workers is that the company has not explained how it chose whom to fire. Dell rigorously evaluates its employees, ranking each on a descending 1-to-5 scale; fives get fired first. But performance didnt seem to matter this time. “The first guy in my department to go was the second highest rated on the team,” says Davidson. “It was more like a shotgun blast, or a lottery.”被解雇员工的最大一个抱怨就是公司没有解释它是如何选择被解雇人员的。戴尔公司严厉的考评其员工，把所有人按1到5的递减比例（顺序）排队（排列），5是首先被裁员的。但是员工的绩效表现这一次似乎并不起作用。“我这个部门第一个走的是团队中第二好的，它更像一次猎枪爆炸或是一次抽奖。16. Some of the workers let go accuse Dell of targeting older, more highly paid workers. “The people left are not the ones who built the company,” says Peterson. “We did all the sweat, and now theyre getting our stock options.” Dell counters that older workers who say they were singled out are just expressing sour grapes or dont understand where they fit in the process.一些被解雇的员工控告戴尔公司解雇对象是年纪较大，工资较高的员工。Peterson说，“那些留下来的并不是创建公司的人，我们流尽了汗，现在他们却持有我们的公司股权。”戴尔公司反驳道，那些年纪大的员工说他们是因为年龄的原因被解雇，恰恰说明了这些人的酸葡萄心理或者他们不明白自己在公司发展中的位置。17. Some say managements choices dont make business sense. Randy Schleicher, 52, who lost his job as a network analyst, says he heard from someone still employed at Dell that the plant making computer portables was on hold for an hour because there wasnt enough tech help after the job cuts. At $11,000 a minute, he says, that would be an expensive delay. 有些人说管理部门解聘人员的选择是没有商业意义的。Randy Schleicher,52岁，解雇前是网络分析师。他说，从仍在戴尔公司留任的员工那得来消息，便携式电脑制造厂因为裁员后没有足够的技术支持，被迫停工一小时。他说，每分钟的损失就是11000美元，这是多么昂贵的耽误啊。18. More broadly, economists are now questioning whether large scale headcount reductions are cost-effective. Kim Cameron, professor of management at the University of Michigan Business School, says studies from 1986 to 1992 show that companies that laid off workers went on to trail their industries in productivity, profitability and shareholder value. “A lot of downsizing is simply done as a message to external constituencies, especially Wall Street,” he says. Dells stock, for instance, rose 9% the day the cuts were announced. It had fallen 62% since March 2000, putting heat on Dell for this kind of move.更广泛的，经济学家现在质疑大规模的人员裁减是否合算。密歇根州大学商学院管理学教授Kim Cameron说，从1986到1992年的研究显示，那些曾裁员的公司在其行业内的生产力、盈利和股东评价(股票价值)继续走低（仍然排在最后）。“很多裁员仅仅是向外界股东传递信息的，特别是华尔街,。”他说。例如，戴尔公司的股票在其宣布裁员当天就上升了9%。自2000年3月以来，它已经跌了62%，这使得戴尔公司下决心来裁员。19. In theory, the fired Dell workers should land on their feet. Most have highly marketable skills, and unemployment in the area is near 2%. Every day they troop to a “career center” in northwest Austin. They check out websites like computer jobs. Com and a bulletin board that boasts 30 “success stories”only limited consolation given that companies where they might naturally landIntel, Motorola and Verizonhave also been trimming workers. Doug Hutter, 41, with two kids at home, lost his job as an IT specialist Feb. 15. “Im starting to get scared,” he says. “Im wondering where the next house payment is coming