[2014.05.03]Office life: 办公室生活
本帖最后由 gangangwen 于 2014-5-18 12:38 编辑 原文地址Office life办公室生活Inside the box狭室犹斗Why workers like their offices为何职员们喜欢所居的办公室May 3rd 2014 | From the print editionCubed: A Secret History of the Workplace. By Nikil Saval.
Doubleday; 352 pages; $26.95 and ￡20《隔间:职场密史》，尼基·萨瓦尔 著，双日出版社；352页；$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世纪美国职场的职员们必须有一副厚脸皮。在1860年，《名利场》（Vanity Fair）将此一时代下的职员们冠以“虚荣，刻薄，自私，贪婪，沉湎酒色，狡猾，口若悬河，胆小怕事”的特征，
当别人都在下大力气干实在活的时候，他们却整日长坐在办公室，处理着由这些劳动而产生的各种文案工作。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.
正如书中萨瓦尔以他清晰明了并引人入胜的笔触所叙述的那样，美国很早以前就淘汰了这种对办公室职员的厌恶观念，并成为了一个“职员国”，他在书中写道：在20世纪早期，办公室才是“正经事真真正正会被付诸实行的地方”。过去那“气氛融洽、让人舒适得近乎窒息的”办公环境已经不复存在，（取而代之的是）一块面积为25平方英尺（2.3平方米）的地方，可以塞进去10个职员，
高楼层与远郊地区中都逐渐有了它们的身影。第二次世界大战后，公司的产业开始从市中心转移至郊区，办公园区随之而起，其中一个例子就是AT&T著名的贝尔实验室，做为“校园”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.”
身为纽约杂志《N+1》编辑的萨瓦尔，利用杂志发展之便调查美国白领在过去的一个半世纪里工作的变化，欧洲和印度的也有简单提及。在变化中发挥了核心作用的是设计与建筑结构，且关于该打造什么样办公室的紧张局面总会反复出现——
打造便利管理职员的办公室？还是打造适应职员需求的工作室？从赫尔曼·麦尔维尔（Herman Melville）的《书记员巴特尔比》，到反响热烈的《呆伯特》连环漫画，萨瓦尔一直在从中汲取商业指南和办公室生活的文化表征的有关内容，并为读者们呈现出一幅办公室的缤纷图景，以此来说明办公场所的变化：“它始于一处潮湿的洞穴，文件层层堆叠，像黑暗的石笋般占满了各处，
直到20世纪50年代，整个场所才变得整洁起来、由里至外都焕然一新”。
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.
《隔间》是一本关于乌托邦式追求的历史，在书中，过去许多一线职员与他们的老板近在咫尺，且晋升至公司高层的机会对每一个人来说都是同样触手可及的，故而一个信念在白领阶层中扎了根——晋升做高管是可能的。
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.
随着从事文书处理的工作变得越来越普遍，管理学理论家试图去完善相关的管理制度：誉为“现代科学管理之父”的弗雷德里克·泰勒（Frederick Taylor）曾提出，任何消极怠工的习惯和行为都可以由密切监视员工并给他们制定日工作量而得以消除。书中众多有趣线索之一便是讲了商业与运动的交集，后者是受乌托邦式追求带来的压力影响而应运产生：现代主义给美国的办公楼建造留下了鲜明的审美特色，在60年代反主流文化大行其道前，它帮助塑造了硅谷的建筑基调。
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.
然而在萨瓦尔看来，这些（强调必达成乌托邦式追求的）承诺屡次遭人背信，用他自己的话说，办公室生活已经变得越来越不安全，且对大多数职员而言，付出与收获是不成比的，对此，一个最好的例子就是隔间，它在书的后几页中像一个悲惨的恶棍般反复出现。
行动式办公室2.0，正如其名所称，明显是未来开放、灵活办公的先驱，但很快问题也随之出现，各个隔间板之间连接的角度变小，到最后变成了盒子般方方正正的形状。隔间的面积在缩小，到06年，一半的美国人说他们的工作隔间比自家的浴室还要小。
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.
随着远程办公变得越来越简单，办公室的故事会逐渐迎来终结吗？美国可能很快就会变成一个自由职业者的国度，自由职业者与临时工一道，被预计在2020年会占据国内至少40%的劳动力。在《隔间》的后部分，萨瓦尔参观了费城的Indy Hall，一个倡导合作的地方，自由职业者们可在此间工作并被给予酬金。类似Indy Hall这样的地方，凭其专业和社会优势，给职员们提供了很多社交互动的机会，并且在其间就职的人数增长也暗示了比起强权，工作场所提供给职员之间的联系更加紧密。办公室时代也许已迈入暮年，但现在看来职员们仍无法彻底离开它们。
From the print edition: Books and arts
【译者注】
Action Office：行动式办公室，Robert Dropst(罗伯特．普罗佩斯特)创立的世界第一个开放式的办公家具系统"行动式办公室"（"Action Office"）。也就是今天被广泛采用的开放式办公屏风系统。（百度百科）
作者: zzdqzhxl
时间: 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.
这句译的有问题
作者: sparker
时间: 2014-5-7 22:16
Cubed 应该是源于 Cube一词，是办公室隔间的意思，翻成魔方似乎不是那么合适吧?
作者: tiffani
时间: 2014-5-8 10:44
同意2楼
作者: aleczhu001
时间: 2014-5-9 15:28
本帖最后由 aleczhu001 于 2014-5-9 17:04 编辑 翻译的不错
有些细节处理不妨探讨探讨。且看标题和第一段
标题：Inside the box 根据作者下文的叙述我们知道他的目的是介绍办公室的历史和文化的变迁，设若翻译成
狭室尤斗 这个侧重点貌似在斗上，而作者介绍办公室内的竞争篇幅很少。是否可考虑再译，室内变迁/狭室风云 等 侧重点似乎应该在介绍办公室的变化上。
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generate的这个词 在这里的的意思是他们从事的文书工作，其他地方的劳动力也一样干 强调工作没什么科技含量，他们无非在瞎混日子，得过且过。所以全文不妨可以稍作调整翻译如下：
19世纪美国的职员们不得不长着一副厚脸皮。1860年，在《名利场》一书中，他们被刻画成“爱慕虚荣，自私刻薄，贪婪好色，多嘴狡猾，胆小怕事”的形象。和其他地方的体力劳动者一样，他们整天处理文书工作，这压根不是他们应该干的事儿。
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.
萨瓦尔以敏锐而引人入胜的手法叙述了办公室历史，美国很早就改变了厌恶职员的观念，现已然成了一个职员之国。到了20世纪早期，他在书中写道，办公室已成为干正事的地方。过去那种温馨舒适的令人窒息环境不复存在。25平方英尺（约2.3平方米）的地方，可以挤进10个雇员，而且办公室不断地搬向高楼大厦和远郊地区。二战后，公司开始从市中心迁移至市郊并建立办公园区，被视为大学校园的前身的 AT&T著名的贝尔实验室的建立就是一例，而且在硅谷至今仍受欢迎。
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.”
萨瓦尔是纽约杂志《N+1》的编辑，她试图利用办公环境的发展来审视美国白领工作在过去的一个半世纪内的变化，并简要地提及了欧洲和印度的相关情况。设计与建筑风格从中发挥着重要作用，令人反复纠结的是：打造便利管理职员办公室呢，还是打造适应员工需求的办公室。从赫尔曼·麦尔维尔的《书记员巴特尔比》，到反响热烈的《呆伯特》连环漫画，她挖掘了办公室生活的业务手册和文化表征，激起了人们对办公室感性共鸣以此来阐释办公场所的变化。他写道，“一开始就像身处潮湿的洞穴，黑暗的石笋般的文件堆满各处，直到50年代，工作场所才里里外外都变得干干净净，焕然一新”。
作者: 君竹
时间: 2014-5-9 17:02
我将“Inside the box”译为“狭室犹斗”是基于两点，《Cubed》书封面是一个小隔间【狭室】，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.”【犹斗】，“斗”我想的是“奋斗”“工作”义，当然了也有“挣扎”的意思在...你提到“斗”字会给人竞争表义倾向也对，但选择“斗”，是因为它拥有所有我想表达的意思，所以目前来说，它是一个很合适的字。
第一段里最后句的“paperwork”，与”generated by manual labour elsewhere“综合考虑下来，我的理解是诸如劳动合同、劳动保障修订一类的paperwork；文里也有对比的意思在，体力劳动者（做正经事的）VS文职人员，前者褒后者贬。
作者: aleczhu001
时间: 2014-5-9 17:16
你说的很有道理。斗这个词在中文中的意思很丰富。翻译这个是仁者见仁 智者见智的事情，没有固定的标准。 斗
dǒu ， ㄉㄡˇ
1.中国市制容量单位（十升为一斗，十斗为一石）：～酒只鸡（经常用作招待客人的简单酒食，家常便饭）。
2. 盛粮食的器具：～筲之人（形容人器量狭小，见识短浅）。
3. 形容小东西的大：～胆。
4. 形容大东西的小：～室。
5. 像斗的东西：～车。～笠。～篷。熨～。
6.星名，二十八宿之一，亦泛指星：南～。气冲～牛（怒气冲天）。
7. 特指“北斗星”：～折蛇行。
8. 古同“陡”，高耸的样子。
9. 〔斗拱〕（枓栱）拱是建筑上弧形承重结构，斗是垫拱的方木块，合称斗拱。
10. 古同“陡”，突然。
如果从第四条词义来解释，这个标题还是甚为合适。但是如果如果你从奋斗这个角度来说的话，估计这个词很难让人联想到这个上面去。呵呵。 个人意见，不一定正确，仅供讨论。
作者: songmingshen
时间: 2014-5-10 10:26
为什么看不了原文，网站总是无法显示，大家遇到这种情况了吗
作者: flyingguanyu
时间: 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.
现代主义给美国的办公楼建造留下了鲜明的审美特色，在60年代反主流文化大行其道前，它帮助塑造了硅谷的建筑基调。
在60年代反主流文化帮助奠定了硅谷的意识形态前，现代主义给美国的办公建筑留下了特殊的审美特色。
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.
对此，一个最好的例子就是隔间，它在书的后面几页中反复出现，就像一个悲惨的恶棍。行动式办公室，正如其名所称，明显是未来开放、灵活办公的先驱。
从间隔的发展史就可见一斑，它在书的后面几页中像一个悲剧的主角反复出现。开始时被叫做工作办公室2.0，明显是自由、灵活为特点的先驱，但很快问题也随之出现
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《隔间》的后部分，萨瓦尔参观了费城的独立纪念馆，一个倡导合作的地方，自由职业者们可在此间工作并被给予酬金。类似独立纪念馆这样的地方，凭其专业和社会优势，给职员们提供了很多社交互动的机会，并且在其间就职的人数增长也暗示了比起强权，工作场所提供给职员之间的联系更加紧密。办公室时代也许已迈入暮年，但现在看来职员们仍无法彻底离开它们。
预计到2020年，自由职业与临时工作的工作量至少约占全部工作力量的40%。在这本书的最后，Saval参观了费城一个名叫Indy Hal地方，它有偿为自由工作者提供共同的工作地点，此类地点利用其专业性和社会性，为自由工作者提供人际交流，他们越来越受欢迎意味着人们到办公地点办公并不仅因为被胁迫。办公室的时代或许已至暮年，但是似乎职员们并不能弃它而去。
http://www.indyhall.org/本来在word上编辑好了，漏译的用红色标注的，复制过来全没了，将就看吧。
欢迎回帖，万望指正。
作者: 君竹
时间: 2014-5-10 20:58
本帖最后由 君竹 于 2014-5-10 21:04 编辑 有些地方你的译文比我的表意更精简~学习了
“在60年代反主流文化帮助奠定了硅谷的意识形态前”我觉得如果是这意思的话，原文的表义应该是before the counterculture's helping shape the ideology
2020那一句是讲人，不是工作量，workforce是工作人员总数的意思
作者: flyingguanyu
时间: 2014-5-11 18:19
艾玛艾玛，被夸精简了好开心。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
新词汇 get√
作者: sparker
时间: 2014-5-11 18:33
Indy Hall怎么成了独立纪念馆了?这是他们的网页，他们是一个自由职业者社区，创立于2006年
http://www.indyhall.org/
作者: fsz
时间: 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世纪美国职场打拼的职员们必须练就一副厚脸皮的本事。在1860年，《名利场》（Vanity Fair）将此一时代下的职员们冠以“虚荣，刻薄，自私，贪婪，沉湎酒色，狡猾，口若悬河，胆小怕事”的特征，不像那些“脚踏实地勤恳做事的老实人”，（成日里想着如何争名夺利的）办公室职员们整日长坐不动，埋首处理着由别处体力劳动问题而产生的文书工作。
1. 第一句加译的东西太多。什么“打拼的”，“练就” ，“本事”都是多余的。
2. real men who did real work 为什么干实事的是老实人？前后是一个real 难道不能统一吗？英文原文也是表达的同一个意思。
3. handling the paperwork generated by manual labour elsewhere
处理因别处的体力劳动而产生的文件。个人认为这里可以适当调整一下叙述，改成对比：当别人都在下大力气干实在活的时候，他们却整日埋头办公室，处理着有这些劳动而产生的各种文案工作。
作者: 君竹
时间: 2014-5-11 20:51
是我的疏忽，昨天改了前面没注意到后面的- - 已更正。
作者: 君竹
时间: 2014-5-11 21:15
谢谢指正~
