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    发一篇文章在下面，若喜欢翻译，想要从事翻译的朋友可以看看，试图翻译一下。同时，请留下你的联系方式（或者发邮件到[email protected]），如果可以，我那朋友会联系你的。但是，在动手之前，请先问自己几个问题：我汉语功底够好吗？？我一直在加强汉语能力吗？？我够细心吗？？是否能体察英语和汉语词汇的细微差别，哪怕是一个标点符号？？我有责任心吗？？即使困难，我也能一直想办法去解决吗？？？我真的适合做文字工作吗？？？冷板凳啊！想好......决定!当然，你的译文要够精彩。

    下面这几段材料，是讲“混凝土”，是我以前帮某出版社的朋友翻译的书稿中的一小部分。建议在翻译的时候，千万别当科技作品翻译。原文极美，各种修辞手法贯穿文本，你得细心体会。汉语，汉语，汉语要美！

      Beautiful Concrete

       The next time it rains, go out and touch some.

       Find a wall or a bench or just a stanchion, and run your hands along the spongy, almost-smooth surface.

       Feel the tough wet muscularity of it.  Skim your fingers over a few of the thousand small holes—bubbles really—that notch the outside.  Pebbles and other tiny bits are lodged in the surface, looking like you might just pry them out.  You will not.

       Trace the little runnels that cut between the slabs, or the little circles of the snap ties.  Imagine the iron rebar skeleton inside, the bones for this rugged flesh.

       But before you do any of that, just look at it.  Look at the chiaroscuro patterns the rain is painting on the micro-pitted planes, the way the wall seems to be weeping its way from light to dark, in running streaks, like mascara.  We call it grey, as if that were one plain colour, but concrete is dozens of shades at once, from various off-whites through to charcoal.  It has swirls and patterns, little islands and continents stained on the extended map of its face.  Concrete is beautiful, never more so than in the rain.

       Yet it is a material people love to hate, for reasons lodged often in conventional disregard and a prejudice for more “natural” materials like wood or finished stone.  Mostly, though, it is because we have not been given the opportunity to see concrete properly.  There are many spectacularly egregious examples of its abuse:  squat Soviet-style blocks full of bureaucrats; or those windswept, boxy warehouses for intellectuals we call modern universities.  Surely much of the hostility we feel towards concrete is owing to the brutalist annexation of its loveliness, the way it was taken over and made into those thick tough slabs that block out the sky.  Any material becomes the sum of its treatments, and concrete has been made to look leaden, solid, heavy.  The standard view is summed by the words of one architectural critic who noted that concrete “has figured heavily in numerous architectural monstrosities, not least because the cheap, durable substance oozes despair and seems to suck up light.”