Word: successful
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...A320's rapid commercial success is hastening that trend. Orders streamed in while the plane was still on the drawing boards, and 21 customers have signed to buy 319 of the high-tech jets at roughly $35 million apiece and have taken out options for an additional 203, making it the fastest-selling airliner in aviation history. Airbus, funded by the governments of France, Britain, West Germany and Spain, desperately needs those sales because its market share and profitability have been eroded by the U.S. dollar's decline. None of the A320's buyers canceled orders last week...
Airbus has a lot riding on the A320's success. Founded 18 years ago, the consortium has spent nearly $2 billion over the past four years to develop the high-tech plane. Although Airbus has succeeded in selling its earlier models, the A300 and the A310, to 58 airlines, the consortium's continuing losses have been aggravated by the weak dollar. The aircraft manufacturer prices its planes in U.S. currency but must pay most of its expenses in relatively stronger European currencies. The consortium last year boasted a 23% share of all worldwide aircraft orders, placing it behind Boeing...
...published in Buenos Aires and began winning international acclaim for a Colombian journalist named Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Yet nearly three years elapsed before One Hundred Years of Solitude made its way into English. The reason for the delay? Argentine Author Julio Cortazar, whose novel Rayuela had become a critical success in the U.S. as Hopscotch, offered Garcia Marquez a piece of advice based on his own happy experience: Get your book translated by Professor Gregory Rabassa of New York City. As it happened, Garcia Marquez had to wait a while; Rabassa was busy...
Translators do not ordinarily achieve such renown, and the wry, soft-spoken foreign-language professor seems bemused by his success in a career he never planned. "It was serendipity all the way," he says. Little in his childhood suggested he would someday become a bridge across Latin and Anglo cultures. The youngest of three sons of a Cuban father and an American mother, Rabassa grew up in and around New York City and seldom heard Spanish spoken about the house: "As a Cuban, my father was eager to adapt to his new environment." The Rabassas later moved to New Hampshire...
Still, to have captured such vibrancy in another language is a major accomplishment. Rabassa attributes his success, paradoxically, to his lifelong devotion to English and its literature: he is a dedicated Joycean and enjoys punning on the master's name ("Shame's Choice"). Despite his fluency in a number of tongues, Rabassa feels most comfortable moving from other languages toward English. "I could take a novel written in the U.S. and turn it into Spanish," he says, "but the result would be terribly flat. My passive vocabulary in Spanish would not be up to the task." Fortunately, as millions...