[2014.05.03]Office life: 辦公室生活
本帖最后由 gangangwen 于 2014-5-18 12:38 編輯 原文地址Office life辦公室生活Inside the box狹室猶斗Why workers like their offices為何職員們喜歡所居的辦公室May 3rd 2014 | From the print editionCubed: A Secret History of the Workplace. By Nikil Saval.
Doubleday; 352 pages; $26.95 and ￡20《隔間:職場密史》，尼基·薩瓦爾 著，雙日出版社；352頁；$26.95&￡20
1 CLERKS in 19th-century America had to have thick skins. In 1860
Vanity Fair characterised them as “vain, mean, selfish, greedy, sensual and sly, talkative and cowardly”. Unlike “
real men who did
real work”, they spent their sedentary days handling the paperwork generated by manual labour elsewhere.
身在19世紀(jì)美國職場的職員們必須有一副厚臉皮。在1860年，《名利場》（Vanity Fair）將此一時代下的職員們冠以“虛榮，刻薄，自私，貪婪，沉湎酒色，狡猾，口若懸河，膽小怕事”的特征，
當(dāng)別人都在下大力氣干實在活的時候，他們卻整日長坐在辦公室，處理著由這些勞動而產(chǎn)生的各種文案工作。2 As Nikil Saval recounts in his sharp and absorbing history of the office, America long ago overcame this aversion and became “a nation of clerks”. By the early 20th century, he writes, the office was “the place where the real work was in fact getting done”. No longer the “intimate, almost suffocatingly cosy” space of the past, where ten employees could be crammed into an area measuring 25 square feet (2.3 square metres), it expanded upwards and outward. After the second world war companies started to swap downtown for the suburbs, establishing office parks like AT&T’s celebrated Bell Labs, a precursor of the “campuses” favoured in Silicon Valley today.
正如書中薩瓦爾以他清晰明了并引人入勝的筆觸所敘述的那樣，美國很早以前就淘汰了這種對辦公室職員的厭惡觀念，并成為了一個“職員國”，他在書中寫道：在20世紀(jì)早期，辦公室才是“正經(jīng)事真真正正會被付諸實行的地方”。過去那“氣氛融洽、讓人舒適得近乎窒息的”辦公環(huán)境已經(jīng)不復(fù)存在，（取而代之的是）一塊面積為25平方英尺（2.3平方米）的地方，可以塞進(jìn)去10個職員，
高樓層與遠(yuǎn)郊地區(qū)中都逐漸有了它們的身影。第二次世界大戰(zhàn)后，公司的產(chǎn)業(yè)開始從市中心轉(zhuǎn)移至郊區(qū)，辦公園區(qū)隨之而起，其中一個例子就是AT&T著名的貝爾實驗室，做為“校園”的前身，至今仍受到硅谷的追捧。
3 Mr Saval, who is an editor at
n+1, a New York magazine, uses these developments to examine the transformation of American white-collar work over the past century and a half, with brief excursions to Europe and India. Design and architecture play a central role in this story, and there is a recurring tension between creating offices that dictate how employees work and those that are shaped by their needs. Mr Saval mines business manuals and cultural representations of office life, from Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” to the hugely successful Dilbert comic. And he evokes the sensory world of the office to illustrate changes in the workplace: “What had started as a dank cavern,” he writes, “with towers of files crowded everywhere like dark stalagmites, had by the 1950s become clean and blindingly lit from within.”
身為紐約雜志《N+1》編輯的薩瓦爾，利用雜志發(fā)展之便調(diào)查美國白領(lǐng)在過去的一個半世紀(jì)里工作的變化，歐洲和印度的也有簡單提及。在變化中發(fā)揮了核心作用的是設(shè)計與建筑結(jié)構(gòu)，且關(guān)于該打造什么樣辦公室的緊張局面總會反復(fù)出現(xiàn)——
打造便利管理職員的辦公室？還是打造適應(yīng)職員需求的工作室？從赫爾曼·麥爾維爾（Herman Melville）的《書記員巴特爾比》，到反響熱烈的《呆伯特》連環(huán)漫畫，薩瓦爾一直在從中汲取商業(yè)指南和辦公室生活的文化表征的有關(guān)內(nèi)容，并為讀者們呈現(xiàn)出一幅辦公室的繽紛圖景，以此來說明辦公場所的變化：“它始于一處潮濕的洞穴，文件層層堆疊，像黑暗的石筍般占滿了各處，
直到20世紀(jì)50年代，整個場所才變得整潔起來、由里至外都煥然一新”。
4 “Cubed” is a history of Utopian striving. Many of the first clerks in the book could reach out from their desks and touch their bosses, and the distance to the top of the company seemed equally slight. An enduring belief in the possibility of upward mobility took hold among white-collar workers.
《隔間》是一本關(guān)于烏托邦式追求的歷史，在書中，過去許多一線職員與他們的老板近在咫尺，且晉升至公司高層的機會對每一個人來說都是同樣觸手可及的，故而一個信念在白領(lǐng)階層中扎了根——晉升做高管是可能的。
5 As clerical labour became ever more widespread, management theorists strove to perfect it: for Frederick Taylor, the pioneer of “scientific management”, any wasteful habits or movements could be eliminated by closely monitoring and timing employees. One of the most interesting threads in the book is the intersection between business and movements with a Utopian strain: modernism lent American office buildings a distinct aesthetic, before the counterculture of the 1960s helped shape the ideology of Silicon Valley.
隨著從事文書處理的工作變得越來越普遍，管理學(xué)理論家試圖去完善相關(guān)的管理制度：譽為“現(xiàn)代科學(xué)管理之父”的弗雷德里克·泰勒（Frederick Taylor）曾提出，任何消極怠工的習(xí)慣和行為都可以由密切監(jiān)視員工并給他們制定日工作量而得以消除。書中眾多有趣線索之一便是講了商業(yè)與運動的交集，后者是受烏托邦式追求帶來的壓力影響而應(yīng)運產(chǎn)生：現(xiàn)代主義給美國的辦公樓建造留下了鮮明的審美特色，在60年代反主流文化大行其道前，它幫助塑造了硅谷的建筑基調(diào)。
6 Yet Mr Saval believes that these promises have been repeatedly betrayed. Office work, in his telling, has become increasingly insecure and unrewarding for the majority. The neatest illustration of this is the history of the cubicle, which haunts the book’s later pages like a tragic villain. The Action Office II, as it was originally called, appeared to be a harbinger of a liberating, flexible future. But there were soon problems. The angles between the cubicles’ three walls narrowed, turning them into boxes. They were shrinking: by 2006, half of Americans believed that their cubicle was smaller than their bathroom.
然而在薩瓦爾看來，這些（強調(diào)必達(dá)成烏托邦式追求的）承諾屢次遭人背信，用他自己的話說，辦公室生活已經(jīng)變得越來越不安全，且對大多數(shù)職員而言，付出與收獲是不成比的，對此，一個最好的例子就是隔間，它在書的后幾頁中像一個悲慘的惡棍般反復(fù)出現(xiàn)。
行動式辦公室2.0，正如其名所稱，明顯是未來開放、靈活辦公的先驅(qū)，但很快問題也隨之出現(xiàn)，各個隔間板之間連接的角度變小，到最后變成了盒子般方方正正的形狀。隔間的面積在縮小，到06年，一半的美國人說他們的工作隔間比自家的浴室還要小。
7 Will the story of the office come to an end, as it becomes easier to work remotely? America could soon be a nation of freelancers; together with temporary workers, they are expected to account for at least 40% of the workforce by 2020. Late in the book Mr Saval visits Indy Hall in Philadelphia, a “co-working” space that is available to freelancers for a fee. Such places offer human interaction, with its professional and social advantages, and their growing popularity suggests that people are bound to their workplaces by more than coercion. The office may be entering its twilight, but it seems workers can’t quite leave it behind.
隨著遠(yuǎn)程辦公變得越來越簡單，辦公室的故事會逐漸迎來終結(jié)嗎？美國可能很快就會變成一個自由職業(yè)者的國度，自由職業(yè)者與臨時工一道，被預(yù)計在2020年會占據(jù)國內(nèi)至少40%的勞動力。在《隔間》的后部分，薩瓦爾參觀了費城的Indy Hall，一個倡導(dǎo)合作的地方，自由職業(yè)者們可在此間工作并被給予酬金。類似Indy Hall這樣的地方，憑其專業(yè)和社會優(yōu)勢，給職員們提供了很多社交互動的機會，并且在其間就職的人數(shù)增長也暗示了比起強權(quán)，工作場所提供給職員之間的聯(lián)系更加緊密。辦公室時代也許已邁入暮年，但現(xiàn)在看來職員們?nèi)詿o法徹底離開它們。
From the print edition: Books and arts
【譯者注】
Action Office：行動式辦公室，Robert Dropst(羅伯特．普羅佩斯特)創(chuàng)立的世界第一個開放式的辦公家具系統(tǒng)"行動式辦公室"（"Action Office"）。也就是今天被廣泛采用的開放式辦公屏風(fēng)系統(tǒng)。（百度百科）
作者: zzdqzhxl
時間: 2014-5-7 17:38
there is a recurring tension between creating offices that dictate how employees work and those that are shaped by their needs.
這句譯的有問題
作者: sparker
時間: 2014-5-7 22:16
Cubed 應(yīng)該是源于 Cube一詞，是辦公室隔間的意思，翻成魔方似乎不是那么合適吧?
作者: tiffani
時間: 2014-5-8 10:44
同意2樓
作者: aleczhu001
時間: 2014-5-9 15:28
本帖最后由 aleczhu001 于 2014-5-9 17:04 編輯 翻譯的不錯
有些細(xì)節(jié)處理不妨探討探討。且看標(biāo)題和第一段
標(biāo)題：Inside the box 根據(jù)作者下文的敘述我們知道他的目的是介紹辦公室的歷史和文化的變遷，設(shè)若翻譯成
狹室尤斗 這個側(cè)重點貌似在斗上，而作者介紹辦公室內(nèi)的競爭篇幅很少。是否可考慮再譯，室內(nèi)變遷/狹室風(fēng)云 等 側(cè)重點似乎應(yīng)該在介紹辦公室的變化上。
CLERKS in 19th-century America had to have
thick skins. In 1860 Vanity Fair
characterised them as “vain, mean, selfish, greedy, sensual and sly, talkative and cowardly”. Unlike “real men who did real work”, they spent their sedentary days handling the paperwork
generated by manual labour elsewhere.
其中g(shù)enerate的這個詞 在這里的的意思是他們從事的文書工作，其他地方的勞動力也一樣干 強調(diào)工作沒什么科技含量，他們無非在瞎混日子，得過且過。所以全文不妨可以稍作調(diào)整翻譯如下：
19世紀(jì)美國的職員們不得不長著一副厚臉皮。1860年，在《名利場》一書中，他們被刻畫成“愛慕虛榮，自私刻薄，貪婪好色，多嘴狡猾，膽小怕事”的形象。和其他地方的體力勞動者一樣，他們整天處理文書工作，這壓根不是他們應(yīng)該干的事兒。
As Nikil Saval recounts in his
sharp and absorbing history of the office, America long ago
overcame this aversion and became “a nation of clerks”. By the early 20th century, he writes, the office was “the place where the real work was in fact getting done”. No longer the “intimate, almost suffocatingly cosy” space of the past, where ten employees could be crammed into an area measuring 25 square feet (2.3 square metres), it expanded upwards and outward. After the second world war companies started to
swap downtown for the suburbs, establishing office parks like AT&T’s celebrated Bell Labs, a precursor of the “campuses” favoured in Silicon Valley today.
薩瓦爾以敏銳而引人入勝的手法敘述了辦公室歷史，美國很早就改變了厭惡職員的觀念，現(xiàn)已然成了一個職員之國。到了20世紀(jì)早期，他在書中寫道，辦公室已成為干正事的地方。過去那種溫馨舒適的令人窒息環(huán)境不復(fù)存在。25平方英尺（約2.3平方米）的地方，可以擠進(jìn)10個雇員，而且辦公室不斷地搬向高樓大廈和遠(yuǎn)郊地區(qū)。二戰(zhàn)后，公司開始從市中心遷移至市郊并建立辦公園區(qū)，被視為大學(xué)校園的前身的 AT&T著名的貝爾實驗室的建立就是一例，而且在硅谷至今仍受歡迎。
Mr Saval, who is an editor at n+1, a New York magazine, uses
these developments to
examine the transformation of American white-collar work over the past century and a half, with brief excursions to Europe and India. Design and architecture play a central role in this story, and there is a recurring tension between creating offices that dictate how employees work and those that are shaped by their needs. Mr Saval mines business manuals and cultural representations of office life, from Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” to the hugely successful Dilbert comic. And he evokes the sensory world of the office to illustrate changes in the workplace: “What had started as a dank cavern,” he writes, “with towers of files crowded everywhere like dark stalagmites, had by the 1950s become clean and blindingly lit from within.”
薩瓦爾是紐約雜志《N+1》的編輯，她試圖利用辦公環(huán)境的發(fā)展來審視美國白領(lǐng)工作在過去的一個半世紀(jì)內(nèi)的變化，并簡要地提及了歐洲和印度的相關(guān)情況。設(shè)計與建筑風(fēng)格從中發(fā)揮著重要作用，令人反復(fù)糾結(jié)的是：打造便利管理職員辦公室呢，還是打造適應(yīng)員工需求的辦公室。從赫爾曼·麥爾維爾的《書記員巴特爾比》，到反響熱烈的《呆伯特》連環(huán)漫畫，她挖掘了辦公室生活的業(yè)務(wù)手冊和文化表征，激起了人們對辦公室感性共鳴以此來闡釋辦公場所的變化。他寫道，“一開始就像身處潮濕的洞穴，黑暗的石筍般的文件堆滿各處，直到50年代，工作場所才里里外外都變得干干凈凈，煥然一新”。
作者: 君竹
時間: 2014-5-9 17:02
我將“Inside the box”譯為“狹室猶斗”是基于兩點，《Cubed》書封面是一個小隔間【狹室】，加之全文最后一句“The office may be entering its twilight, but it seems workers can’t quite leave it behind.”【猶斗】，“斗”我想的是“奮斗”“工作”義，當(dāng)然了也有“掙扎”的意思在...你提到“斗”字會給人競爭表義傾向也對，但選擇“斗”，是因為它擁有所有我想表達(dá)的意思，所以目前來說，它是一個很合適的字。
第一段里最后句的“paperwork”，與”generated by manual labour elsewhere“綜合考慮下來，我的理解是諸如勞動合同、勞動保障修訂一類的paperwork；文里也有對比的意思在，體力勞動者（做正經(jīng)事的）VS文職人員，前者褒后者貶。
作者: aleczhu001
時間: 2014-5-9 17:16
你說的很有道理。斗這個詞在中文中的意思很豐富。翻譯這個是仁者見仁 智者見智的事情，沒有固定的標(biāo)準(zhǔn)。 斗
dǒu ， ㄉㄡˇ
1.中國市制容量單位（十升為一斗，十斗為一石）：～酒只雞（經(jīng)常用作招待客人的簡單酒食，家常便飯）。
2. 盛糧食的器具：～筲之人（形容人器量狹小，見識短淺）。
3. 形容小東西的大：～膽。
4. 形容大東西的小：～室。
5. 像斗的東西：～車。～笠。～篷。熨～。
6.星名，二十八宿之一，亦泛指星：南～。氣沖～牛（怒氣沖天）。
7. 特指“北斗星”：～折蛇行。
8. 古同“陡”，高聳的樣子。
9. 〔斗拱〕（枓栱）拱是建筑上弧形承重結(jié)構(gòu)，斗是墊拱的方木塊，合稱斗拱。
10. 古同“陡”，突然。
如果從第四條詞義來解釋，這個標(biāo)題還是甚為合適。但是如果如果你從奮斗這個角度來說的話，估計這個詞很難讓人聯(lián)想到這個上面去。呵呵。 個人意見，不一定正確，僅供討論。
作者: songmingshen
時間: 2014-5-10 10:26
為什么看不了原文，網(wǎng)站總是無法顯示，大家遇到這種情況了嗎
作者: flyingguanyu
時間: 2014-5-10 19:23
One of the most interesting threads in the book is the intersection between business and movements with a Utopian strain: modernism lent American office buildings a distinct aesthetic, before the counterculture of the 1960s helped shape the ideology of Silicon Valley.
現(xiàn)代主義給美國的辦公樓建造留下了鮮明的審美特色，在60年代反主流文化大行其道前，它幫助塑造了硅谷的建筑基調(diào)。
在60年代反主流文化幫助奠定了硅谷的意識形態(tài)前，現(xiàn)代主義給美國的辦公建筑留下了特殊的審美特色。
2 The neatest illustration of this is the history of the cubicle, which haunts the book’s later pages like a tragic villain. The Action Office II, as it was originally called, appeared to be a harbinger of a liberating, flexible future.
對此，一個最好的例子就是隔間，它在書的后面幾頁中反復(fù)出現(xiàn)，就像一個悲慘的惡棍。行動式辦公室，正如其名所稱，明顯是未來開放、靈活辦公的先驅(qū)。
從間隔的發(fā)展史就可見一斑，它在書的后面幾頁中像一個悲劇的主角反復(fù)出現(xiàn)。開始時被叫做工作辦公室2.0，明顯是自由、靈活為特點的先驅(qū)，但很快問題也隨之出現(xiàn)
3 Late in the book Mr Saval visits Indy Hall in Philadelphia, a “co-working” space that is available to freelancers for a fee. Such places offer human interaction, with its professional and social advantages, and their growing popularity suggests that people are bound to their workplaces by more than coercion. The office may be entering its twilight, but it seems workers can’t quite leave it behind.
在《隔間》的后部分，薩瓦爾參觀了費城的獨立紀(jì)念館，一個倡導(dǎo)合作的地方，自由職業(yè)者們可在此間工作并被給予酬金。類似獨立紀(jì)念館這樣的地方，憑其專業(yè)和社會優(yōu)勢，給職員們提供了很多社交互動的機會，并且在其間就職的人數(shù)增長也暗示了比起強權(quán)，工作場所提供給職員之間的聯(lián)系更加緊密。辦公室時代也許已邁入暮年，但現(xiàn)在看來職員們?nèi)詿o法徹底離開它們。
預(yù)計到2020年，自由職業(yè)與臨時工作的工作量至少約占全部工作力量的40%。在這本書的最后，Saval參觀了費城一個名叫Indy Hal地方，它有償為自由工作者提供共同的工作地點，此類地點利用其專業(yè)性和社會性，為自由工作者提供人際交流，他們越來越受歡迎意味著人們到辦公地點辦公并不僅因為被脅迫。辦公室的時代或許已至暮年，但是似乎職員們并不能棄它而去。
http://www.indyhall.org/本來在word上編輯好了，漏譯的用紅色標(biāo)注的，復(fù)制過來全沒了，將就看吧。
歡迎回帖，萬望指正。
作者: 君竹
時間: 2014-5-10 20:58
本帖最后由 君竹 于 2014-5-10 21:04 編輯 有些地方你的譯文比我的表意更精簡~學(xué)習(xí)了
“在60年代反主流文化幫助奠定了硅谷的意識形態(tài)前”我覺得如果是這意思的話，原文的表義應(yīng)該是before the counterculture's helping shape the ideology
2020那一句是講人，不是工作量，workforce是工作人員總數(shù)的意思
作者: flyingguanyu
時間: 2014-5-11 18:19
艾瑪艾瑪，被夸精簡了好開心。恩 查了牛津
workforce：1 all the people who work for a particular company; 2 all the people in a country or an area who are available for work
新詞匯 get√
作者: sparker
時間: 2014-5-11 18:33
Indy Hall怎么成了獨立紀(jì)念館了?這是他們的網(wǎng)頁，他們是一個自由職業(yè)者社區(qū)，創(chuàng)立于2006年
http://www.indyhall.org/
作者: fsz
時間: 2014-5-11 19:05
CLERKS in 19th-century America had to have thick skins. In 1860 Vanity Fair characterised them as “vain, mean, selfish, greedy, sensual and sly, talkative and cowardly”. Unlike “real men who did real work”, they spent their sedentary days handling the paperwork generated by manual labour elsewhere.
在19世紀(jì)美國職場打拼的職員們必須練就一副厚臉皮的本事。在1860年，《名利場》（Vanity Fair）將此一時代下的職員們冠以“虛榮，刻薄，自私，貪婪，沉湎酒色，狡猾，口若懸河，膽小怕事”的特征，不像那些“腳踏實地勤懇做事的老實人”，（成日里想著如何爭名奪利的）辦公室職員們整日長坐不動，埋首處理著由別處體力勞動問題而產(chǎn)生的文書工作。
1. 第一句加譯的東西太多。什么“打拼的”，“練就” ，“本事”都是多余的。
2. real men who did real work 為什么干實事的是老實人？前后是一個real 難道不能統(tǒng)一嗎？英文原文也是表達(dá)的同一個意思。
3. handling the paperwork generated by manual labour elsewhere
處理因別處的體力勞動而產(chǎn)生的文件。個人認(rèn)為這里可以適當(dāng)調(diào)整一下敘述，改成對比：當(dāng)別人都在下大力氣干實在活的時候，他們卻整日埋頭辦公室，處理著有這些勞動而產(chǎn)生的各種文案工作。
作者: 君竹
時間: 2014-5-11 20:51
是我的疏忽，昨天改了前面沒注意到后面的- - 已更正。
作者: 君竹
時間: 2014-5-11 21:15
謝謝指正~
