请高手帮忙看看下面几段英文该如何翻译
自己翻译出来读的时候感觉语言不流畅，很别扭。所以请大家帮帮忙看有没有更好地译文~机器翻译勿扰，谢谢大家！
What happens to all the miscellaneous material that comes in addressed to no one in particular? At the BBC it goes to a central script unit which employs readers to report on it. Their reports give a synopsis of the plot, list the number of cast and sets and film locations involved and pass an opinion on the virtues or otherwise of the script. Unfortunately, few if any of the readers chosen by the script department have any practical knowledge of television production. The people who do have presumably do not want to become readers. Their assessments will therefore tend to be on the literary, rather than the practical, side. Even so it is unlikely, in fact almost impossible, that anything of real merit would pass through their hands without being recognized such and recommended. At worst, readers’ reports will tell the producer or editor whether the subject matter of the script is of any interest. It will certainly sort out for him the lunatic-fringe scripts and it will channel material to the right people---thirty-minute plays to the producer of “Thirty Minute Theatre”, longer plays to “Play for Today” etc.
What does the producer or editor do then? It seldom happens that an unsolicited script sent in “on spec” gets put on. Why? Because they are almost never suited to the medium, what such a script does show the producer is that the writer has something to say, and is capable of saying it in terms of dramatic incidents and in dialogue rather than narrative. It’s up to the TV expert then to help acquaint the writer with the special requirements of TV as opposed to fiction, radio, the stage etc. what usually happens in this case is that the writer is commissioned to write another play on a subject that is of interest to the programme and in a way suited to the medium.
What does this mean exactly? In the days when I started on “Armchair Theatre” it meant something very different from what it does now. in those days, all our plays were recorded on videotape and videotape editing was primitive if not unheard of. Some plays were still done “live”. No exterior filming was done. Writers had then, by necessity, to observe the Aristotelian unities of time and place. If a character left a room for you could not then immediately cut to him driving along in his car or see him twenty years later, old and gray. A filler scene had to be written for another character in order to give the first one time to change and appear on another set.
Perhaps one of the reasons why the first three scripts I have mentioned were so excellently constructed is that the writers were forced to restrict themselves in this way. TV plays were undoubtedly closer to the theatre than the cinema then, the word being as important as the image, or more so. Now TV is getting closer to the big screen. So the TV playwright of ten years ago had to be a better craftsman than he does now. The plotless ‘slice of life’ play could not really be made to work in a studio set-up without the surrounding documentary images of film.
What were the influences in those days? On ‘Armchair Theatre’ there was unquestionably a very strong American and Canadian influence. When Sydney Newman had left North American in 1958 to produce ‘Armchair Theatre’, drama on American TV was in its heyday with such programmes as ‘Playhouse 90’ and ‘Play of the Week’. Writers like Tad Mosel, Paddy Chayefsky(of Marty fame), Rod Serling (Requiem for a Heavyweight) and Reginald Rose were writing about those very subjects that the kitchen-sink dramatists in England were about to tackle, though perhaps in a more sentimental way---strikes, working-class underprivileged misfits, boxers, etc, all speaking the language of the ‘working class’---the antithesis of drawing-room drama.
A survey of ‘Armchair Theatre’ in its early dats shows a surprisingly high percentage of plays of American or Canadian origin. Take 1958, for instance. Among the transmissions were: Tragedy in a Temporary Town by Reginald Rose; The Five Dollar Bill by Tad Mosel; Paid in Full by Mordecai Richler; Noon on Doomsday by Rod Serling; The Traveling Lady by Horton Foote; The Greatest Man in the World by James Thurber (adapted by Reuben Ship, a Canadian); Please Murder Me by Gore Vidal, as well as two American classics: The Emperor Jones by Eugene O’Neill and The Time of Your Life by William Saroyan.
The follow year was about the same statistically and then the number of imports began to decline as a school of native playwrights was emerging or being discovered. ‘Armchair Theatre’ was, of course, at the time largely stocked with directors who were either of Canadian nationality like Ted Kotcheff and Alvin Rakoff or had worked in Canada like Charles Jarrott and David Greene, or in the United States like Alan Cooke, John Moxey and Philip Saville. With the opening of commercial TV, there was a shortage of trained directors; Canadians did not deed work permits. There was not only a great deal of ready-made material to import from North American, there was also a group of trained people to supplement the English BBC-trained directors. (I do not talk here of the BBC drama output of thr time, which will be dealt with in the next chapter, or of the other commercial companies, of which I have no personal Experience.)
The fact was that ‘Armchair Theatre’ went on the air an average of forty-six weeks a year and that there was, as yet, no real British school of TV dramatists. Consequently there was a desperate shortage of material. Hence the borrowing from American and Canadian TV… something I find ironically reversed now that the mainstay of ‘class’ drama in the United States and Canada seems to be BBC and some ITV imports. The wheel appears to have come full circle. There is no doubt in my mind, however, that much of the vitality of the new ‘slice of life’ drama in England was inspired by American films and television.
One of my job when I first started at ABC was to read the New York Times review section, hunting desperately for plays which seemed in any way suitable for purchase. I can remember one panic situation when we were so desperately short of material for ‘Armchair Mystery Theatre’ that I sent a telegram to a New York Agent for the immediate purchase of a play which had just been transmitted on the ‘United States Steel Hour’ and had been well reviewed. When the script, entitled Madeleine, arrived, it was immediately flung into production with Adrienne Corri,Maurice Denham and Michael Gwynn playing ‘American style’ French characters. The script appeared to be the right length on arrival, but when I had finished trimming the surrounding advertising material, I found it to be about twelve minutes short: a nasty shock in view of the absence of the writer and the immediacy of the situation. On American TV there was a guest introducer telling the audience about the stars, future programmes and the merits of steel sink units. At the end of the play, he introduced the following week’s guest stars. The play itself seemed to be the least important element: something to wrap around the sponsor’s message. I remember writing the missing twelve was a murderess who served people toadstools; I had her reading out recipes for mushroom soup from a cook-book.
[ 本帖最后由 香皂泡泡 于 2008-6-4 10:49 编辑 ]
