采访稿翻译案例2.doc

妙文翻译公司翻译样稿Q1. Do you think that flexible production has dominated the production of urban space in the world? If so, what are the implications for urban forms and social structures of cities?问题1. 您认为灵活生产已经在当今世界的城市空间生产中占据绝对优势了吗？如果是，它对都市的形态和城市的社会结构意味着什么呢？Allen J. Scott: Flexible production is the term that came into existence as the Fordist mass production system was beginning to go into crisis. 阿兰.斯科特：“灵活生产”这个术语出现于“福特主义规模生产系统”开始进入危机的时候。What it signifies is the opposite of mass production in that flexible production, especially flexible specialization, usually involves the production of small batches of output with changing design specifications in increasingly competitive and uncertain markets. “灵活生产”代表的是大规模生产的对立面，后者中的灵活生产，尤其是灵活专业化生产，通常涉及在竞争和不确定性不断加剧的市场中小批量产品的生产，且设计规格不断改变。At the same time, flexible production is associated with vertical disintegration of production processes. 同时，灵活生产还与生产过程的纵向分解有关。There have always been forms of flexible production through 19th century and 20th century capitalism, but of course the leading edges in the greater part of the 20th century were the mass production industries, not the flexible industries at all. 在19世纪和20世纪，资本主义中一直存在着灵活生产的形式，但是，毫无疑问20世纪绝大部分时期占据主导地位的仍是大规模生产工业，而不是灵活工业。Flexible production is marked by rapidly changing design specifications, vertical disintegration, transactions intensive inter-relations between firms, and a relatively unstable set of labor relationships. These forms of production are quintessentially given to locational agglomeration so that as flexible production has risen in the contemporary era we have also seen new industrial spaces appearing, new agglomerations in various parts of the world, and the resurgence of urban growth in the more advanced capitalist countries and the less advanced countries as well. I actually now would prefer the term “cognitive-cultural economy” to flexible production, because I think it captures more substantively what is the stake in the new economy. This form of production has now moved to the leading edges of capitalism in terms of employment expansion and innovation. That is not to say that mass production has disappeared. Mass production is still with us, but mass production is no longer - as it once was - the dynamic leading edge of contemporary capitalism. Nor do we have now anything like the immense growth poles driving that peculiar version of metropolitan growth characteristic of northeast United States in the postwar years.灵活生产的特点是快速变化的设计规格、垂直分解、公司间交易频繁的相互联系以及相对不稳定的劳动力关系。这些生产形式共同导致了地理聚集，因此灵活生产在当代就出现了，与此同时我们看到了新工业空间的出现，世界各个角落的新的聚集，发达资本主义国家以及欠发达国家城市发展的复兴。实际上，现在我更加偏好“认知文化经济”这一术语，而不是灵活生产，因为我认为它更能实质上体现新经济的基础。现在这种生产形式通过雇佣扩张和创新已经成为资本主义的主力。这不是说大规模生产已经消失了。大规模生产依旧在我们身边，但是它不再与从前一样是当代资本主义生机勃勃的主导力量了。现在，我们也不存在什么急速增长极之类的东西，来推动怪异的大都市发展，就如战后时期美国东北部那样。Xu Wei: do you mean suburbanization, the decline of urban centers?Xu Wei：您的意思是指郊区化，城市中心的衰落?Allen J. Scott: No, I was actually thinking the growth of the large metropolis including Detroit, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Chicago. Eventually they did decline or stagnate with the demise of Fordist mass production.阿兰.斯科特：不是，事实上我正在思考底特律、辛辛那提、克利夫兰、芝加哥等大都市的发展。最终，它们确实随着“福特主义规模生产系统”的终结而衰落或者停滞了。Wei: So, this decline can be interpreted as a shift towards flexible or cognitive cultural economy?Wei:那么，可以把这种衰落解释为向灵活或者认知文化经济转变吗？Allen J. Scott:. The shift is part of what happened. The demise of Fordist mass production was a complex phenomenon, at least in North America, of increasing competition from Japan and newly industrializing countries and the saturation of markets for mass produced goods. In the space provided by this crisis and in the context of technologies that were appearing, flexible production and the cognitive cultural economy started to appear. It is a very complex history that no-one has even yet fully worked out. 阿兰.斯科特：转变只是事实的一部分。“福特主义规模生产系统”的终结是一个复杂的现象，至少在北美来说，包括来自日本和新工业化国家的竞争的加剧，以及大规模生产产品市场的饱和。在这一危机形成的空间中，在新兴技术出现的背景下，灵活生产和认知文化经济开始显现。这是一段非常复杂的历史，还没有人彻底探究清楚。 Q2. Some scholars argue that American or advanced capitalist Fordism has been exported to the developing countries, and China as a World Factory has been the test site indicating that the “old or obsolete” Fordism or mass production is very much alive and is affecting urban change a great deal. How do you see this line of argument in relation to globalization? How do you see or characterize the interplay between Fordism and flexible production in different parts of the world?(29：00)问题2.有些学者认为美国或发达资本主义国家的福特主义已经输出到了发展中国家，作为世界工厂，中国成了试验地，表明“陈旧或过时”的福特主义或大规模生产仍然十分活跃，且正严重影响着城市的变化。对于与全球化有关的这类观点，您怎么看？您怎么评价或者描绘福特主义和灵活生产在世界不同地区的相互作用？(29：00)Allen J. Scott: I dont think the more advanced capitalist countries are still exporting a Fordist model. They did export a Fordist model in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s in the form of very standardized branch plants into the less developed countries. There is no doubt quite a bit of standardized branch plant development still going on, but recent research on the multinational corporations suggests that they are no longer exporting outmoded fordist technologies and labor processes, because even in less developed countries the new branch plants that are being established are of a high technological and skill level and are marked by significant internal flexibilities. For example, in the American owned car industry in Mexico, many of the plants are more efficient than some of the plants in US. There is also a phenomenon of the exportation of low wage packages of work from the US, Japan, and Europe to these countries, but this very much involves things like clothing, shoes, leather goods, and these kinds of industries while being often highly exploitative are not really fordist in the classical sense if only because they are not organized around large-scale capital intensive assembly lines with huge internal economies of scale. The technologies now are much more advanced, the labor processes much more flexible, and so I would argue that the old Fordist model of the international division of labor is not so much on the cards anymore. Also, what we have now are highly organized international commodity chains linking independent producers in low wage countries and firms in high wage countries, with an enormous amount of technological and marketing information flowing backwards and forwards, and there is accordingly a lot of upgrading going on in the Third World countries. So the old model of peripheral Fordism is no longer the major element of the new international division that it once was.阿兰.斯科特：我不认为发达资本主义国家仍然在输出福特主义模型。在20世纪50、60和70年代，他们确实把福特主义模型以非常标准化的分厂的形式输出到了欠发达国家。无庸置疑，还有很多标准化的分厂开发仍然在进行中，但是关于跨国企业的一项最近的研究表明他们已经不再输出过时的福特主义技术和劳动过程，因为即使在欠发达国家，正在建设的新分厂也具有高技术和技能水平，具有显著的内部灵活性。例如，在墨西哥的美国所属汽车工业，很多工厂比美国本土的一些工厂效率还高。还存在一个现象，从美国、日本和欧洲向这些国家输出低薪工作包，但是这主要涉及服装、鞋类、皮革制品，在传统意义上，这些行业虽然通常剥削程度很高不属于福特主义的范畴，只因为他们不是建立在大规模资本密集的组装生产线上，具有巨大的内部规模经济效应。现在技术更先进了，劳动过程更灵活了，因为，我认为国际劳动分工的旧福特主义模型已经不再盛行了。而且，我们现在所拥有的是具有高度组织性的国际商品链，把低薪国家的单个生产者与高薪国家的公司连接起来，大量的技术和市场信息在交互传递，与此同时，第三世界国家正在进行着大量的升级。因此，旧的外围福特主义模型已经不再是新的国际分工的主要部分，虽然它曾经是。Q3. How do you assess the major contradictions that are embedded in the mode of production in contemporary capitalism and what are the implications for the urban development in the developing world? (36:20)问题3. 您如何评价当代资本主义生产方式的内在主要矛盾，对发展中国家的城市发展意味着什么呢？Allen J. Scott: The biggest urban problem of the new economy is the polarization of urban society, because the new economy is producing a very large number of highly skilled and trained workers, the creative class, but on the other hand, it is also pulling into major cities very large numbers of unskilled immigrants, often illegal workers, from the countryside in the case of China, or from other countries in the case of the US. This pattern of social segmentation in cities means that cities are full of social tensions and political predicaments of which the most obvious one is the potential for social explosions of various kinds, a phenomenon that we see from time to time in Europe and in the US. Spontaneous revolts of the underclass are part of this configuration of urban life. The other problem, of course, is that this underclass is not only an underclass economically, but is also outside of the mainstream of political life these people are not brought into the mainstream of political life. They have limited rights of citizenship, and many barriers exist to their full participation in the social and political life of the city, and hence there is an enormous problem not only of income inequality, but also of social integration of these immigrants into contemporary cities. The new cognitive-cultural economy in the US and UK seems to have been associated with an overall declining sense of community at all levels. Many books have been written recently about the decline of community, especially in US cities. See, for example, publications by Sennett or Putnam. Christopher Lasch in an early work called The Culture of Narcissism points to the self-obsessed individual as a distinctive figure of contemporary American society. 阿兰.斯科特：新经济的最大城市问题是城市社团的极化，因为新经济正