Wednesday, February 8

Translation practice

Today you will receive a small excerpt in English to practice your translation skills.Tomorrow, we will send the answer keys and some comments about this text. Try to do the translation with your own words before consulting the dictionary.

“On Monday morning, at the United Nations, the Secretary-General delivered his annual report on priorities—a kind of State of the Planet address. He begins by saying, in a sentence typed in bold in the official transcript, ‘We must end the merciless, relentless, senseless war on nature.’ That war, he continues, ‘is putting our world at immediate risk of hurtling past the 1.5-degree temperature increase limit and now still moving towards a deadly 2.8 degrees.’ Hence: ‘We need disruption to end the destruction. No more baby steps. No more excuses. No more greenwashing. No more bottomless greed of the fossil fuel industry and its enablers.’ He continues in the same vein, ending with this excoriation of the fossil-fuel industry, which has enjoyed record returns, in large part because of the war in Ukraine: ‘I have a special message for fossil-fuel producers and their enablers scrambling to expand production and raking in monster profits: If you cannot set a credible course for net-zero, with 2025 and 2030 targets covering all your operations, you should not be in business. Your core product is our core problem. We need a renewables revolution, not a self-destructive fossil fuel resurgence.’”

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-un-secretary-generals-searing-message-for-the-fossil-fuel-industry (texto adaptado)