比特币 精选笔译

January 25

笔译练习

朋友们，大家好。

今天，我们为大家推送比特币专题下的精选笔译练习。

练习分为“英译汉”和“汉译英”两个部分，难度适中，着重考察读者对比特币基本知识和表达的掌握，强化读者的语言基础和笔译技巧。

英译汉练习

My holiday conversations confirmed a rather worrying trend that digital currency experts have noticed in the past year, as bitcoin swung wildly from $1,000 at the start of 2017 to a $19,000 peak at one point (and all over the place in between): millennials, and particularly male ones, are riding the speculative wave. So there might be many young men right now who can’t believe their bitcoin luck, but parents should brace for tears when the bubble bursts.

A few weeks before the holidays, a survey released by Blockchain Capital, a venture capital firm, found that while two per cent of Americans have owned bitcoin, four per cent of millennials — generally seen as those born between the early 1980s and the early 1990s — have dabbled or owned the digital currency. Among male millennials that share rises to 6 per cent. More than 50 per cent of millennials polled said bitcoin was a positive technological innovation and more than a quarter considered bitcoin safer than banks.

There were also a few people I met who were still struggling to understand the fundamentals. For example, what is bitcoin in the first place, and how does it relate to blockchain, the underlying decentralized technology? One person ventured that blockchain was the casino and bitcoin the chip, which is absolutely an apt description since investing in cryptocurrencies is very much like gambling.

（全篇共225词，主要探讨了千禧年一代对比特币的热衷。文章难度不大，翻译时需注意文体的对应。）

汉译英练习

2008年11月1日，一个自称中本聪(Satoshi Nakamoto)的人在一个隐秘的密码学讨论组上贴出了一篇研究报告，报告阐述了他对电子货币的新构想——比特币就此问世。自互联网诞生以来，电子货币因其方便和难以追踪性，并能脱离政府和银行的监管，而成为一个热门话题。上世纪90年代，一个名为“密码朋克”的密码破译组织就致力于创建电子货币，但付出的努力没收到任何成效。同样在90年代早期，密码破译者大卫·乔姆创建了一个匿名系统——“电子现金”，也失败了，部分原因是依赖于政府和信用卡公司的现有基础设施。

比特币用公开分布总账摆脱了第三方机构的制约，中本聪称之为“区块链”。用户贡献出CPU的运算能力，运行一个特殊软件来做一名“挖矿工”，这会形成一个网络共同来维持“区块链”。这个过程会生成新货币。交易在这个网络上发生，运行“挖矿”软件的电脑争相破解密码难题。第一个解决难题的“矿工”会得到50比特币奖励，相关交易区块会加入区块链。随着“矿工”数量的增加，每个迷题的困难程度也随之提高，这使每个交易区块的比特币生产率维持在大约10分钟一枚。此外，每达到21万个区块，奖励就减半，比如，从50比特币减到25,再从25到12.5，一直持续下去。到2140年，比特币将达到预定的2100万枚上限。

（全篇共497字，主要讲解了比特币的产生和基本原理，后者包括“区块链”、“挖矿”等基本概念解释。翻译时需注意术语的正确性。）

明天我们将为读者推送参考译文。读者也可以将译文反馈至后台，我们将在号内进行探讨和交流。