Delta 191 disaster at D/FW Airport gave rise to broad safety overhaul
Конкурс письменного перевода в Международном Центре, 2020 г.
«Лучшее для лучших»
Попробуйте свои переводческие силы в работе над самыми значимыми текстами современности.
В 2020 году на конкурс мы отобрали тексты победители Пулитцеровской премии, одной из наиболее престижных наград США в области литературы, журналистики, музыки и театра.
И предлагаем нашим лучшим студентам познакомится с лучшими текстами мировой журналистики и литературы.
Inside the German Empire in the Third Year of the War (1916)
Автор текста: американский журналист Герберт Байярд Своуп.
Первый лауреат Пулитцеровской премии в номинации “Репортаж”. Он был удостоен престижного приза за серию материалов в газете The New York World под названием «Изнутри Германской империи» (Inside The German Empire), опубликованных в октябре 1916 года.
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The desire for peace is strong in Germany, but from top to bottom there is no belief that it is near. German hopes and expectations of the end are indefinite as to time; the most optimistic can see no real prospects within another two years, and from that period the conjectures run up to ten years. And in their economic and military planning the Kaiser's subjects are preparing to enact their motto of durchhalten (stick it out) for years to come.
A striking illustration of the lack of consideration given to the idea of any peace but one "wholly satisfactory to Germany's national aspirations" is the diplomatic secret that in 1915 and the first half of 1916 no fewer than eleven separate interrogatories were submitted to the German Government as to Belgium. The question has been asked by the United States, Spain, Denmark, Holland, Sweden, Switzerland, Norway, and other neutrals if Germany will give a formal assurance of the restoration of Belgian entity at the end of the war; but not once has this assurance been given, nor has the Government, in its most affable moments, permitted even inferentially the idea to gain ground that it regarded Belgium's reëstablishment according to the status quo ante as an absolutely essential condition of peace.
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While it is reasonably certain that the preponderance of enlightened German opinion favors the reëstablishment of Belgium, nevertheless in a statement I prepared for submission to the Chancellor regarding the objectives of the war (to which I shall refer again) the suggestion that Belgium would be reëstablished within her old lines was carefully blue-penciled by an official acting for the Chancellor. The explanation was made that Belgium was, as Kaiser Wilhelm I said in a letter to his empress, a point of weakness in the empire's rear and flank. Therefore Germany must be safeguarded against this danger.
At the same time, so runs the German reasoning, the securance of German safety means the securance of Belgium's welfare. Obviously, this logic would lead to the conclusion that Belgium's greatest security against the world would be found in being a German state; and if she is or is not to take on such a condition is precisely the question that Germany will not answer. It is true that the sentiment against annexation in the empire is deeper than the sentiment favoring such a development, but even the anti-annexationists agree that certain changes in boundaries must be made or certain places taken as hostage before Germany can feel secure.
Full book
https://www.questia.com/read/3176461/inside-the-german-empire-in-the-third-year-of-the
The Really Big One
Кэтрин Шульц (Kathryn Schulz). The New Yorker, 2016 год
Пулитцеровская премия за первоклассный научный рассказ о разломе Каскадии, мастерский образец репортажа на экологическую тематику и стиля.
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The first sign that the Cascadia earthquake has begun will be a compressional wave, radiating outward from the fault line. Compressional waves are fast-moving, high-frequency waves, audible to dogs and certain other animals but experienced by humans only as a sudden jolt. They are not very harmful, but they are potentially very useful, since they travel fast enough to be detected by sensors thirty to ninety seconds ahead of other seismic waves. That is enough time for earthquake early-warning systems, such as those in use throughout Japan, to automatically perform a variety of lifesaving functions: shutting down railways and power plants, opening elevators and firehouse doors, alerting hospitals to halt surgeries, and triggering alarms so that the general public can take cover. The Pacific Northwest has no early-warning system. When the Cascadia earthquake begins, there will be, instead, a cacophony of barking dogs and a long, suspended, what-was-that moment before the surface waves arrive. Surface waves are slower, lower-frequency waves that move the ground both up and down and side to side: the shaking, starting in earnest.
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Soon after that shaking begins, the electrical grid will fail, likely everywhere west of the Cascades and possibly well beyond. If it happens at night, the ensuing catastrophe will unfold in darkness. In theory, those who are at home when it hits should be safest; it is easy and relatively inexpensive to seismically safeguard a private dwelling. But, lulled into nonchalance by their seemingly benign environment, most people in the Pacific Northwest have not done so. That nonchalance will shatter instantly. So will everything made of glass. Anything indoors and unsecured will lurch across the floor or come crashing down: bookshelves, lamps, computers, cannisters of flour in the pantry. Refrigerators will walk out of kitchens, unplugging themselves and toppling over. Water heaters will fall and smash interior gas lines. Houses that are not bolted to their foundations will slide off—or, rather, they will stay put, obeying inertia, while the foundations, together with the rest of the Northwest, jolt westward. Unmoored on the undulating ground, the homes will begin to collapse.
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Across the region, other, larger structures will also start to fail. Until 1974, the state of Oregon had no seismic code, and few places in the Pacific Northwest had one appropriate to a magnitude-9.0 earthquake until 1994. The vast majority of buildings in the region were constructed before then. Ian Madin, who directs the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries (dogami), estimates that seventy-five per cent of all structures in the state are not designed to withstand a major Cascadia quake. fema calculates that, across the region, something on the order of a million buildings—more than three thousand of them schools—will collapse or be compromised in the earthquake. So will half of all highway bridges, fifteen of the seventeen bridges spanning Portland’s two rivers, and two-thirds of railways and airports; also, one-third of all fire stations, half of all police stations, and two-thirds of all hospitals.
Full article
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one
A Boy of Unusual Vision
Элис Штейнбах (Alice Steinbach). The Baltimore Sun, 1984 год.
Пулитцеровская премия за рассказ о мире слепого мальчика «Мальчик с необычным восприятием»
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First, the eyes: They are large and blue, a light, opaque blue, the color of a robin’s egg. And if, on a sunny spring day, you look straight into these eyes—eyes that cannot look back at you—the sharp, April light turns them pale, like the thin blue of a high, cloudless sky.
Ten-year-old Calvin Stanley, the owner of these eyes and a boy who has been blind since birth, likes this description and asks to hear it twice. He listens as only he can listen, then: “Orange used to be my favorite color but now it’s blue,” he announces. Pause. The eyes flutter between the short, thick lashes, “I know there’s light blue and there’s dark blue, but what does sky-blue look like?” he wants to know. And if you watch his face as he listens to your description, you get a sense of a picture being clicked firmly into place behind the pale eyes.
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He is a boy who has a lot of pictures stored in his head, retrievable images which have been fashioned for him by the people who love him—by family and friends and teachers who have painstakingly and patiently gone about creating a special world for Calvin’s inner eye to inhabit.
Picture of a rainbow: “It’s a lot of beautiful colors, one next to the other. Shaped like a bow. In the sky. Right across.”
Picture of lightning, which frightens Calvin: “My mother says lightning looks like a Christmas tree—the way it blinks on and off across the sky,” he says, offering a comforting description that would make a poet proud.
“Child,” his mother once told him, “one day I won’t be here and I won’t be around to pick you up when you fall—nobody will be around all the time to pick you up—so you have to try to be something on your own. You have to learn how to deal with this. And to do that, you have to learn how to think.”
Full article
http://reprints.longform.org/a-boy-of-unusual-vision-alice-steinbach
Delta 191 disaster at D/FW Airport gave rise to broad safety overhaul
Dallas Morning News . Пулицеревская премия за спецрепортаж об авиакатастрофе 1986 года, последовавшем расследовании и последствиях для безопасности полётов.
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On the afternoon of Aug, 2, 1985, Delta 191 ran into a developing thunderstorm and wind shear conditions as it made its final approach to D/FW. The winds - a weather phenomenon known as a microburst - initially sped the plane up, then slowed it down dramatically and caused it to hit the ground before the runway.
One of the plane's wing engines struck a car on State Highway 114, killing its driver, and the plane bounced into a water tank and exploded. Of the 163 passengers and crew, all but 29 were killed; two more died later from injuries.
Subsequent troubles
Delta 191 wasn't the last wind shear-related crash. In 1994, a US Air flight crashed in Charlotte despite having wind shear detection equipment on board.
Wind shear downdrafts from microbursts - sudden vortexes of wind from thunderstorm cells - also played a role in American Airlines' Little Rock, Ark., crash in 1999, but that crash was blamed on pilot decisions.
But other than those incidents, commercial aviation hasn't seen a repeat of Delta 191.
"I think it's been a real success story," said Bill Mahoney, a wind shear expert for the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., who said two previous incidents set the stage for the FAA to require wind shear equipment on planes and improve ground tracking.
"It was one of those strange things where you had an accident where people started to think about wind shear followed by an accident that confirmed the phenomenon, followed by an accident in 191 that forced the FAA to act," he said.
The airport has 18 wind shear detection towers to team with two large golf-ball-shaped Doppler radar arrays to hunt for threats.
And the next batch of air traffic control technology - a suite of projects referred to as NextGen - includes a weather package that aims to give "four-dimensional" forecasting that airlines, air traffic controllers and pilots can see together to make better decisions related to bad weather.
Full article
www.dallasnews.com/news/transportation/2010/08/02/1985-delta-191-disaster-at-d-fw-airport-gave-rise-to-broad-safety-overhaul/
The Nickel Boys
Автор Колсон Уайтхед (Colson Whitehead). Пулитцеровская премия 2020 года за лучший роман «Парни из Никелевой академии»
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Elwood was twelve when the encyclopedias appeared. One of the busboys dragged a stack of boxes into the kitchen and called for a powwow. Elwood squeezed in – it was a set of encyclopedias that a traveling salesman had left behind in one of the rooms upstairs. There were legends about the valuables that rich white people left in their rooms, but it was rare that this kind of plunder made it down to their domain. Barney the cook opened the top box and held up the leather-bound volume of Fisher's Universal Encyclopedia, Aa-Be. He handed it to Elwood, who was surprised at how heavy it was, a brick with pages edged in red. The boy flipped through, squinting at the tiny words – Aegean, Argonaut, Archimedes – and had a picture of himself on the front room couch copying words he liked. Words that looked interesting on the page or that sounded interesting in his imagined pronunciations.
Cory the busboy offered up his find – he didn't know how to read and had no immediate plans to learn. Elwood made his bid. Given the personality of kitchen, it was hard to think of anyone else who'd want the encyclopedias. Then Pete, one of the new dishwashers, said he'd race him for it.
Pete was a gawky Texan who'd started working two months prior. He was hired to bus tables, but after a few incidents they moved him to the kitchen. He looked over his shoulder when he worked, as if worried about being watched, and didn't talk much, although his gravelly laughter made the other men in kitchen direct their jokes toward him over time. Pete wiped his hands on his pants and said, "We got time before the dinner service, if you're up for it."
The kitchen made a proper contest of it. The biggest yet. A stopwatch was produced and handed to Len, the gray-haired waiter who'd worked at the Hotel for over twenty years. He was meticulous about his black serving uniform, and maintained that he was always the best-dressed man in the dining room, putting the white patrons to shame. With his attention to detail, he'd make a dedicated referee. Two fifty-plate stacks were arranged, after a proper soaking supervised by Elwood and Pete. The two busboys acted as seconds for this duel, ready to hand over dry replacement rags when requested. A lookout stood at the kitchen door in case a manager happened by.
Excerpt (3 pages)
https://www.bookbrowse.com/excerpts/index.cfm/book_number/3943/page_number/1/the-nickel-boys#excerpt
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