双语读物：走进比尔和梅琳达·盖茨基金会（英汉对照）.doc

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Inside the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
走进比尔和梅琳达·盖茨基金会

These days the former Microsoft boss Bill Gates devotes his time to running what has arguably become the most powerful charitable organisation in the world. Is this the future of giving - and, if so, is that a good thing?
这些日子，前微软公司老板比尔·盖茨将个人的所有时间，都投入于运作全球最大、备受争议的慈善机构，这是慈善事业的未来吗？如果是，这是一件好事吗？
Andy Beckett
安迪·贝克特

Bill and Melinda Gates at a TB clinic in South Africa
比尔和梅林达·盖茨在南非的结核病诊所。

The headquarters of probably the most powerful charity in the world, and one of the most quietly influential international organisations of any sort, currently stand between a derelict restaurant and a row of elderly car repair businesses. Gentrification has yet to fully colonise this section of the Seattle waterfront, and even the actual premises of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which, appropriately perhaps, used to be a cheque-processing plant, retain a certain workaday drabness. Only four storeys high, with long rows of windows but no hint of corporate gloss, its beige and grey box sits anonymously in the drizzly northern Pacific light.
比尔和梅林达·盖茨基金会可能是世界上最强大的慈善机构，也是最有影响力的国际组织之一，目前的总部位于一间废弃的餐厅和一排老式汽车维修厂之间。尽管这里是比尔和梅林达·盖茨基金会所在地，但是，旧城改造工程还没有覆盖这片西雅图海滨区域，确切地说，这里曾是票据处理厂，至今仍保留着工业区的单调乏味。基金会大楼只有四层高，窗户成排，却没有公司的光鲜华丽，在北太平洋朦胧的阳光映衬下，米色和灰色的格子间看起来毫不起眼。
There is no sign outside the building. There is not even an entrance from the street. Instead, visitors must take a side road, stop at a separate gatehouse, also unmarked, and introduce themselves to a security guard, of the eerily polite and low-key kind employed by ex-heads of state and the extremely rich. Once admitted, you cross a car park full of modest vehicles and, if you are lucky, glimpse one of the world-renowned health or poverty specialists working for the foundation, dressed in the confidently casual Seattle office uniform of chinos and rainproofs. Then you reach the reception: finally, there is a small foundation logo on the wall, and beside it a few lyrical photographs of children and farmers in much dustier and less prosperous places than Seattle. Only past the reception, almost hidden away on a landing, is there a reminder of the foundation's status and contacts: a vivid shirt in a glass case, presented during a visit by Nelson Mandela.
大楼外没有机构的标志。甚至在街上找不到入口。相反地，游客必须走侧门，在一个独立的门岗前停下（这里也没有标志），向保安说明来意，这些异常礼貌和低调的保安都曾受雇于前国家元首和巨富。身份核实后，你要穿过一个满是中档汽车的停车场，如果幸运的话，还会看见某位世界著名的健康或贫困问题专家，他们为基金会工作，信心满满，身着西雅图白领中常见的休闲棉布防水制服。 接着，你会来到接待处：终于在墙上看到了小小的基金会标志，旁边挂着几张富有诗意的儿童和农民的照片，他们所在的地方，比西雅图更脏、更破败。 越过接待处，在一处近乎隐蔽的平台，才能看出基金会的地位和人脉：在一个玻璃盒子里，展示着纳尔逊·曼德拉在访问中留下的衬衫。
The low-lit corridors beyond have little of the scruffiness and bustle you often find at charities. The fast- expanding foundation staff (presently around 850 employees) are in increasing demand around the world: meeting governments, attending summits and conferences, and above all "in the field", as foundation people put it, checking on the progress of the hundreds of projects – from drought-tolerant seeds to malaria vaccines to telephone banking for the developing world – to which the organisation has given grants since it was founded in 1994.
在灯光昏暗的走廊里，几乎看不到其他慈善机构常有的脏乱和喧嚣。随着全球业务需求的增加，基金会人数快速膨胀（目前已有近850名雇员）， 忙于会晤政府官员，出席峰会和会议，以及从事最重要的“实地”工作，这是基金会人员的术语，意思是检查数百个项目的进展情况，从耐旱种子到疟疾疫苗，到发展中世界的电话银行，该组织从1994年成立以来，就在向这些项目提供捐款。
In Seattle, maps of Africa and southern Asia, the foundation's main areas of activity outside America, are pinned up in the often empty, sparsely decorated offices and cubicles. There are also cuttings about the foundation's work from the Economist and the Wall Street Journal, not publications you might have previously associated with a big interest in global disease and poverty. And lying on the foundation's standard-issue, utilitarian desks, there are its confidently written and comprehensively illustrated reports: Ghana: An Overall Success Story is the title of one left in the unoccupied office I have been lent between interviews.
在西雅图总部装修简陋的办公室和隔间里，常常用图钉固定着非洲和南亚地区（基金会在美国之外主要的活动区域）的地图。也有《经济学家》和《华尔街日报》上关于基金会工作的剪报，而不是与全球疾病和贫困相关的大集团出版物。毫不奢华的办公桌上，摆放着基金会内部撰写的、内容详尽的报告，我在采访中使用的空房间里，看到了别人留下的一份报告，题目是：加纳：全面成功的故事。
The foundation, in short, feels like a combination of a leftish thinktank, an elite management consultancy and a hastily expanding internet start-up. Is it the sort of institution that can really help the world's poorest people?
简而言之，基金会感觉像是一个左派智囊机构、精英管理咨询公司和快速扩张的互联网创业企业的结合体。这家机构能够真正帮助世界上的最穷人群吗？
For 14 of the last 16 years Bill Gates has been the richest person on earth. More than a decade ago, he decided to start handing over the "large majority" of his wealth – currently ￡36bn – for the foundation to distribute, so that "the people with the most urgent needs and the fewest champions" in the world, as he and his wife Melinda put it on the foundation website, "grow up healthier, get a better education, and gain the power to lift themselves out of poverty". In 2006, Warren Buffett, currently the third richest person in the world, announced that he too would give a large proportion of his assets to the foundation. Its latest accounts show an endowment of ￡24bn, making it the world's largest private foundation. It is committed to spending the entire endowment within 50 years of Bill and Melinda Gates's deaths. Last year it awarded grants totalling ￡2bn.
在过去十六年中的十四年间，比尔·盖茨一直是地球上最富有的人。十几年前，他决定开始将“大部分财富”（目前为360亿英镑）移交到基金会进行分配，并与妻子梅琳达建立了基金会网站，以便使世界上“需求最为迫切、财富最少的人们能够更健康，获得更好的教育和自我摆脱贫困的力量。” 2006年，沃伦巴菲特（目前是世界上第三大富有的人）宣布，也将把资产的绝大部分捐赠给基金会。最新账目显示，基金会获得的捐款已达240亿英镑，使其成为世界上最大的私人基金。基金会承诺，在比尔和梅琳达·盖茨过世五十年内，用掉所有捐款。去年，它的对外拨款金额达20亿英镑。

As well as its money, it is the organisation's optimism and the fame of its main funder – in 2008 Bill Gates stopped working full-time for his computer giant Microsoft to concentrate on the foundation – that has given it momentum. Last May an editorial in the revered medical journal the Lancet praised it for giving "a massive boost to global health funding . . . The Foundation has challenged the world to think big and to be more ambitious about what can be done to save lives in low-income settings. The Foundation has added renewed dynamism, credibility, and attractiveness to global health [as a cause]."
基金会的发展不仅借助于资金，也凭借其主要资助者的乐观和名望。2008年，比尔·盖茨停止了在电脑巨头微软公司的全职工作，专注于基金会的运作。去年五月，医学杂志《柳叶刀》的一篇社论赞扬基金会“对全球卫生资金起到重大推动作用……该基金会向世界发出了挑战，要求人们从大处着眼，更雄心勃勃地投入与挽救低收入人群的生命。基金会为全球健康（事业）增加了新的活力、可靠性和吸引力。”
Precise effects of big charity projects can be hard to measure, especially over a relatively short period. But already two bodies that the foundation funds heavily, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (Gavi) and the Global Fund to Fight HIV/Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, have, according to the foundation, delivered vaccines to more than 250 million children in poor countries and prevented more than an estimated five million deaths.
大型慈善项目的确切效果可能很难衡量，尤其是在相对短的时期内。但是，基金会表示，主要由它提供资金的两家机构（全球疫苗和免疫联盟和全球抗击艾滋病毒/艾滋病、结核和疟疾基金）已经向贫穷国家超过2.5亿儿童发放了疫苗，估计已避免了超过500万人死亡。
"The foundation has brought a new vigour," says Michael Edwards, a veteran charity commentator and usually a critic of billionaire philanthropists. "The charity sector can almost disempower itself; be too gloomy about things . . . Gates offers more of a positive story. He is a role model for other philanthropists, and he is the biggest."
“该基金会带来了新的活力，”常常对亿万富翁慈善家进行评论的资深慈善评论家迈克尔·爱德华兹说。 “由于对事情过于悲观，慈善机构几乎都会丧失信心…… 盖茨不仅给人们提供了一个积极的例子。他是其他慈善家的行动榜样，是最伟大的。”
"Everyone follows the Gates foundation's lead," says someone at a longer-established charity who prefers not to be named. "It feels like they're everywhere. Every conference I go to, they're there. Every study that comes out, they're part of. They have the ear of any [national] leadership they want to speak to. Politicians attach themselves to Gates to get PR. Everyone loves to have a meeting with Gates. No institution would refuse."
“每个人都会随盖茨基金会而动，”一个不愿意透露姓名的老牌慈善机构工作人员说。 “感觉他们无处不在。每次我去参加会议，他们都在现场。每个研究出来，他们都曾参与其中。他们要讲话，总有（国家）领导人愿意倾听。政治家紧随盖茨，希望获得公关效应。大家都喜欢与盖茨会晤。没有机构会拒绝。”
The foundation has branch offices in Washington DC, Delhi and Beijing. This year, it opened an office in London, not in one of the scruffy inner suburbs usually inhabited by charities, but close to the Houses of Parliament.
基金会在华盛顿、新德里和北京设有分支机构。今年，他们在伦敦开设了办事处，不是选址在慈善机构通常居住的破旧近郊，而是靠近国会大厦。
Seth Berkley, head of the International Aids Vaccine Initiative [IAVI], says: "The foundation has the advantage of speed and flexibility. When they want to, they can move quickly, unlike many other large bureaucracies. Most of the other private foundations in the US don't work globally. Others are more staid than Gates. I used to work at the Rockefeller Foundation [an older American charity] and dole out grants in small amounts. The Gates foundation gave us at IAVI a grant of $1.5m (￡1m), then $25m. Then they gave us a line of credit – which is extremely unusual in grant-making – of $100m, to give us assets to be able to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies and initiate vaccine development programmes. Using that $100m, we were able to leverage lots more funding – $800m in total. What Gates allowed us to do was go out and search for new ideas and move quickly on them. The old way was to find the new ideas, and then look for a donor to back them."
国际艾滋病疫苗倡议行动主席塞思·伯克利说：“该基金会拥有速度和灵活性的优势。只要他们愿意做，就可以迅速行动，不像其他许多大的官僚机构。美国其他大多数私人基金会无法在全球开展工作。其他人比盖茨更古板。我曾经在洛克菲勒基金会（一家美国老牌慈善机构）工作，捐款数额很少。盖茨基金会在国际艾滋病疫苗倡议行动的首次捐款是150万美元（约合100万英镑），然后是2500万美元。之后他们给了我们1亿美元的信用额度，这在赠款项目中很不寻常，使我们有资本与制药公司谈判，并启动疫苗开发方案。利用这1亿美元，我们能够获得更多的资金，总共达8亿美元。盖茨允许我们走出去，寻找新的思路，并迅速行动。老办法是找到新的思路，然后再寻找捐赠者来支持它们。”
Besides its dizzying grants, the foundation is also becoming a magnet for talented staff and collaborators. "We probably get more than our fair share of great external expertise and insight," says chief executive Jeff Raikes. foundation staff can have a certain self-assurance. When the history of global health is written, says Katherine Kreiss, the foundation officer overseeing its nutrition projects, "the start of the Gates foundation will absolutely be a seminal moment."
除了令人眼花缭乱的捐款，基金会也正吸引着有才华的员工和合作者。基金会的首席执行官杰夫·雷克斯说， “我们可能比普通机构获得更多的外部专业知识和洞察力，”令基金会工作人员具有一定的自信心。基金会负责监督营养项目的凯瑟琳·克瑞斯说，在全球健康历史上，“盖茨基金会的创立，绝对是一个开创性的时刻。”
Some have reservations about this power and the use made of it. Mindful of the foundation's ubiquity, few in the charity world are prepared to criticise it on the record. But last May the Lancet published two authored articles on the foundation. "Grant-making by the Gates foundation," concluded one, "seems to be largely managed through an informal system of personal networks and relationships rather than by a more transparent process based on independent and technical peer review." The other article found that, "The research funding of the Foundation is heavily weighted towards the development of new vaccines and drugs, much of it high risk and even if successful likely to take at least the 20 years which Gates has targeted for halving child mortality."
有些人对这种权力及其使用持保留意见。他们对基金会的普遍存在怀有戒心，极少有基金会愿意将公众的批评记录在案。但在去年5月《柳叶刀》发表了两篇关于盖茨基金会的署名文章。一篇文章的结论是， “盖茨基金会的捐款决策很大程度上是通过人脉和关系的非正式系统来管理的，缺乏更为透明的、基于独立和专业人士审核的流程。”另一篇文章认为，“该基金会的研究经费严重倾向于新疫苗和药物的开发，风险很高，即便研发成果，如果要达到盖茨所说的将儿童死亡率降低一半的目标，可能至少需要20年。”
In a forthcoming article for the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, Devi Sridhar, a global health specialist at Oxford University, describes as a "particularly serious problem" the "loss of health workers from the public sector to better funded NGOs offering better remuneration". She also suggests that the foundation, like other health organisations based in rich countries but active in the poor southern hemisphere, "[has] tended to fund . . . a large and costly global health bureaucracy and technocracy based in the north". The foundation responds, "Much of our grant-making goes to large intermediary partners that in turn provide funding and support to those doing the work in the field, often to developing country institutions. We're not able to provide a simple funding breakdown."
在《法律、医学及伦理》杂志即将发表的的一篇文章中，牛津大学全球卫生专家黛维·斯瑞达认为，卫生工作者离开公共部门，投身到待遇更好的非政府机构，是“特别严重的问题”。她还建议盖茨基金会不要像其他富裕国家的健康组织一样，只是“致力于在北方国家资助……更大规模、更昂贵的全球健康官僚机构和技术专家，” 而应该积极投入到贫困的南半球开展工作。基金会回应道，“我们的大部分拨款会发往大型中介合作伙伴，他们为实地工作的人们提供资金和支持，通常用于发展中国家的机构。我们无法提供一份简单的资助名单。 ”
The rise of the foundation has been part of a larger revival of interest in the west in the problems of poor countries. This phenomenon has encompassed increased government aid budgets, initiatives by the World Health Organisation and World Bank, celebrity-led events and campaigns such as Live8, image-conscious corporate schemes, and countless private ventures, from the sober and long-term to the reactive, adventure-seeking, self-styled "extreme humanitarianism" currently being practised in Haiti by freelance American volunteers and breathlessly described in the July issue of Vanity Fair.
基金会的崛起，部分体现出西方世界对贫穷国家问题的兴趣正在增大。这种现象的影响，超过了世界卫生组织和世界银行增加的政府援助预算、名人发起的慈善演出和活动，以及不胜枚举的私人投资，从理智和长期的项目，到富有冒险精神和个人色彩的“极端人道主义”行为，比如《名利场》杂志七月号上刊登的美国自由职业者在海地正在举行的自愿行动。
It is hard to see this explosion of activity as a wholly bad thing. But it does have political implications. "It's kind of [creating] a post-UN world," says someone close to the Gates foundation. "People have gotten interested in fast results." The UN, he says, is too slow and bureaucratic – you could say democratic – to achieve them. Critics of the new, more entrepreneurial aid industry such as the Dutch journalist Linda Polman, in her recent book War Games: The Story of Aid and War in Modern Times, see empire-building and wasteful competition as well as worthwhile altruism. "Everyone in global health is talking about poor coordination," says someone at a charity in that field. "The Gates foundation is contributing to the fragmentation and duplication."
很难说这种活动的爆发完全是坏事。但它确实会有政治上的影响。 “这是在（创造）后联合国世界，”一位熟悉盖茨基金会的人士说。 “人们对快速得到结果感兴趣。”他认为，联合国在实现这些目标时过于缓慢和官僚（你可以称之为民主）。也有来自新兴创业援助行业的批评声音。荷兰记者琳达·波尔曼在最近出版的《战争游戏》一书中写道：现代时代的援助和战争，目睹着帝国的建立、人们争相挥霍，以及以利己为目的的利他主义。“全球委身系统中的每一个人都在谈论协调不力，” 该领域一家慈善机构的人士说。“盖茨基金会有助于这个系统的解构和复制。”
And finally, a suspicion lingers, slowly fading but still there, that the foundation's activities are some sort of penance for Gates's world-dominating behaviour at Microsoft – or a continuation of that world domination by other means. Both Raikes and his predecessor as foundation chief executive were at Microsoft; Raikes from 1981 to 2008, during which time he was the company's key figure after Gates and his co-founder Paul Allen.
最终，怀疑渐渐消退了，但并没有彻底消除，基金的活动是对微软统治世界的某种自我惩罚——或者是延续统治世界的其它方法。莱基斯和他的前任在微软都是担任基金的首席执行官；在1981到2008年担任基金首席执行官期间，他在微软是仅次于盖茨和共同创办人保罗?艾伦的关键人物。
As Raikes sits in his office, a little messy-haired, dressed in a zip-up jumper, fidgety in his chair and brisk in his answers, he even seems a bit like Gates. "There are some real cultural differences between the Gates foundation and Microsoft," he says. "Some of that's good and some of that's not so good. The foundation is in