M: Good afternoon, Ms Webber. It's nice to meet you again. Please take a seat. What can I do for you?
W: Well, Mr Carter. We met last week when we held our two-day conference at the hotel. And you're the conference manager at the hotel, according to the name card you gave me?
M: Yes, that's right. Ms Webber. I trust everything went well for you and your colleagues.
W: Well, the conference itself was fine, but I want to meet you now because some of the arrangements made by the hotel weren't up to the standard we'd expected from your hotel.
M: I'm very sorry to hear that. Could you tell me what the problems were?
W: Yes, certainly. The first two complaints were to do with the rooms. Twenty of us stayed in the hotel, and two people reported that their rooms weren't ready for our arrival and hadn't been cleaned properly. The first person found the bed hadn't been made up and there weren't any clean towels, so he had to wait while the room was made ready for him. That wasn't a major problem, but considering other things weren't done properly either, I felt I ought to tell you that I thought your standards had slipped and that we won't be recommending any of our colleagues or other companies we work with to come to your hotel in the future.
M: I'm very sorry to hear that, of course. But can you tell me what the other problems were so that we can improve the standard of service?
W: The second person complained that a full ashtray had been left in her room, even though she'd been led to believe there was a non-smoking policy in the bedrooms, and the cups and saucers were dirty, and had just been left by the previous occupant of the room.
M: I can only apologise. The housekeeper should have checked that all the rooms had been cleaned properly and were ready before a guest was allowed to go into them.
W: The other thing, that was more major, as it affected us all, was the main dinner on the Thursday night.
M: What was the problem there?
W: It was a working evening, so we'd deliberately asked for the meal to be served at 7:30 so that we could continue with our discussions afterwards. We had drinks at 7:00, then went to the restaurant at 7:30, expecting the meal to be served almost immediately. Everything was laid out for us, and it looked ready, but then we waited and waited -- other colleagues kept asking the waiters what the problem was -- in fact we never got an explanation, let alone an apology. As a result, we didn't finish eating until 9:30, and we wasted a lot of time just waiting. The most annoying thing was that nobody seemed to be in charge -- we should have been warned there was a problem.
M: I'm very sorry to hear all this. I should have been told about it by the kitchen manager, but this is the first time I've heard of the problem. I can only apologise on behalf of the hotel.
W: I don't feel prepared to authorise payment of your bill, which has arrived very punctually. It's a lot of money and we had expected a much better standard of service at your hotel.
M: Our staff are normally very reliable, and most of our customers enjoy their stay here, and in fact many of them return regularly. I'm afraid you've experienced some very bad luck, and I shall make a full investigation into what went wrong. Thank you very much for giving me so much feedback. I shall do my best to ensure it never happens again, to you or anyone else.
W: No，I certainly hope not.
M: As for the invoice you've been sent, please disregard it. I'll have a new one made out, with a deduction of 10% because of the poor service you received here.
W: Well, that would make a difference, thank you, Mr Carter.
关于酒店会议抱怨的翻译讲解
03 1609 - News Listening
RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has said that it sees no need to cancel, delay or move the Rio Olympic Games because of the Zika virus threat. However IOC medical director Richard Budgett said that it would continue to monitor the situation closely. Mr Budgett was responding to a call by Canadian health Professor Amir Attaran for the Games to be postponed or moved. Prof.Attaran said that the influx of visitors to Brazil would result in the avoidable births of malformed babies. “If the IOC and the World Health Organisation (WHO) do not have the generosity of heart to delay the games to prevent children being born and disabled their whole lives, then they're among the cruellest institutions in the world,” Prof.Attaran said in a telephone interview with the Associated Press news agency.
Forty-six people aboard a tourist catamaran were rescued after the vessel caught fire and sank on Australia's Great Barrier Reef, police said. A police statement said 19 of those rescued were taken to hospitals in Bundaberg and Gladstone for treatment of non-life threatening injuries after the vessel sank late Wednesday.
The 23-meter catamaran, Spirit of 1770, was returning to the town of 1770 after a day trip to Lady Musgrave Island when it caught fire and was abandoned 30 minutes later. Passengers and crew took to life rafts, Australian Broadcasting Corp. reported. The fire started in the engine room, ABC reported. The town of 1770 was named after the year that British explorer James Cook and the crew of HM Endeavour landed on that stretch of the Australian east coast.
BOSTON, UNITED STATES
Two bystanders and an off-duty deputy sheriff were hailed as heroes Wednesday for intervening when a mentally disturbed man went on a stabbing rampage at a home and a mall hours after leaving a hospital, killing two people and injuring at least five others. George Heath, a visual design teacher at the Regional Vocational Technical High School, was at the bar with his wife, Rosemary Heath. She said they had just ordered a drink when they heard a scream and saw DaRosa stabbing a young woman, Rosemary Heath said she pushed the woman out of the way and grabbed the back of DaRosa's shirt. “My husband was struggling with him to get the knife away,” She said, “I think he went down low on him to get him around the elbows so he couldn't raise his arm up, and then he pulled his arm back and then stabbed my husband in the head.”
George Heath, 56, later died. Mayor Thomas Hoye Jr. called Heath “certainly a hero.”“He stepped up,'
Hoye said.“He prevented a tragic situation from getting worse.”
Rosemary Heath said Plymouth County Deputy Sheriff James Creed, who was off-duty and at the bar eating dinner, repeatedly ordered DaRosa to drop the knife. When DaRosa refused Creed fired one shot at his abdomen, killing him and preventing “further carnage.”
PHALODI, INDIA
A city in India's Rajasthan state has broken the country's temperature records after registering 51℃ , the
highest since records began, the weather office says. The new record in Phalodi in the desert state comes amid a heat wave across India. The previous record for the hottest temperature stood at 50.6C℃ in 1956. The heatwave has hit much of northern India, where temperatures have exceeded 40℃ for weeks.
The run-up to the Indian monsoon season is always characterised by weeks of strong sunshine and increasing heat but life-threatening temperature levels topping 50℃ are unusual.
India declares a heatwave when the maximum temperature hits 45℃ , or five degrees higher than the average for the area in previous years.
CAMBRIDGE, UNITED STATES
Scientists have designed flying, insect-sized robots that can perch and launch from ceilings. The findings, reported in the journal Science, contribute to a decade-long Harvard Micro-robotics Laboratory project called “RoboBee”. The robots in this study are programmed drones, each around the size of a 10 pence coin.
Equipped with sensors, swarms of these small, relatively cheap robots could alert first responders to the most
intense areas of forest fires or other natural disasters.
Hovering micro-robots run out of energy really quickly. Perching allows the robots to conserve energy. Detaching easily from a surface was another challenge. To solve these problems, the researchers designed a small flat “landing patch” with an electrostatic charge that can be switched on and off. When switched on, the patch acquires a negative charge that makes it stick to nearby, more positively charged surfaces. And for the dismount, simply remove power to the patch.
新闻翻译
04 1609 - Korean
W: The film Undoing is set in Koreatown. Can you talk about using Koreatown as backdrop for the story?
M: We set the environment in Koreatown for no specific reason. It's more LA., Los Feliz. It's not a Korean American-specific story either. People were saying it was a very Korean American story, and I think the only reason people were saying that was because they saw the Asian faces. Americans do a film in Chinatown with white actors, and they don't say it's a Chinese American story. We don't speak Korean, and we don't go into the idea of being Korean American. It was an interesting backdrop. We asked ourselves where a character like Sam Kim would live, and he would probably live at 6th & Hobart, and he was probably born in Koreatown. He's more urban American. For us it made sense in terms of budgeting, as an independent film. We have resources because we have friends here, and we could probably get some free locations.
W: Sung, you were a producer for this film. How did you get involved in the production side of things?
M: Four years ago, Chris had just got back from Singapore doing television, and he was really excited about the prospects of Asian American film. He thought it'd be nice to try and do a feature. And from that day on, he wrote the script. I came on as a producer because I just think we need to pull our resources, financing, and locations together and kind of develop the script together. I think becoming the producer was kind of by default. I don't particularly enjoy producing: if it were up to me, I would just act.
W: Do you think you're going to continue going back and forth between Hollywood films and independent films?
M: In a perfect world that would be great. Do Hollywood films where you're paid a certain rate, you can send your kids to school, and work with some really established actors. At the independent level, that's where an Asian American actor is really going to get the chance to play a three-dimensional character and take a risk. We can look at all these Hollywood films in production, and how many of the first to fourth principal roles will go to Asian Americans. I'd say 99% of them will not, so on the independent level, there might be more opportunity. But independent films are designed to fail, so if these films don't get distributed and tickets don't sell, I think the likelihood of independent films is pretty sparse too. On the other hand, I've realized that with the younger generation, there is this demand for someone to identify with.
W: Are you saying that there will be an Asian American audience that will be identifiable within the next generation or so?
M: Yes. I think it's happening now. I was in New York and I realized there are these 13 to 16 year old girls and boys. They want something that's quick -- a popcorn movie, a summer action flick. But they see a character that speaks English, and they can identify with him, because he's American. It just happens that the first principle character is this Korean American guy in Tokyo. They like that. They want to see their faces without the kung fu, without the accent, and you realize with these girls, they want their idol. And you know they're going to go to college, they're going to be educated, and they're going to be the ones who are buying the tickets. Because it's not about being Korean American or Chinese or Vietnamese or Japanese. It's just Americans that happen to be Asian. I think it's changing. I felt that.
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