This becomes clear as soon as one crosses the threshold of Applied Minds, which sprawls over five flat buildings in an industrial area of Glendale, Calif. Behind an ordinary reception area, a door opens to a small room with only a red phone booth that could have been a prop in an Austin Powers movie. Hillis picks up the handset. "[B]The blue moon jumps over the purple sky[/B]," he says, a twinkle in his eye acknowledging the [B]corniness[/B] of the process. The wall behind him opens up to what [B]geeks[/B] hope to see when they go to heaven: a vast room packed with brainiacs at work and exquisitely bizarre gizmos, ranging from a 13-foot skeleton of a robot dinosaur to a gleaming [B]outback vehicle [/B] loaded with more communications gear than the trailers outside "Monday Night Football." It's a virtual museum of the future that rambles over several buildings.
At every turn, there's something to make your mouth hang open. Here's an array of data-display screens that looks like Han Solo's cockpit. There's a room populated with architectural mock-ups of "[B]podules," fully wired instant buildings[/B] designed for stealthy government agencies ([B]that's a picture of Donald Rumsfeld running a meeting in the full-scale version of the model sitting beneath it[/B]). Another area looks like Albert Einstein's chop shop, stuffed with half- disassembled Cadillac Escalade SUVs hooked up to exotic telemetry. Oops! Almost stepped on a six-foot-long robotic snake, slithering on the floor with scary fidelity to a pit viper.
譯得好棒！
我英文能看懂可是跟中文連不起來，慚愧。
查了一下詞典，覺得你譯得都對。
比如the corniness of the process本意是說雖然有點老套但還是magnificent,譯成「此行的不同尋常」，這「不同尋常」四字本身就是「雖然有點老套但還是magnificent」. geek就是怪人啦，這裡是說像Einstein and Edison 那樣的科技怪人，頭髮亂蓬蓬，眼睛紅紅沒睡醒，半夜裡把地板炸個洞。podule seems to be a computer software term. i googled to find some info below. and i think your translation fits. and that 《王牌大賤諜》，it is really a funny and "cheap" spy!
(from Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged. Merriam-Webster, 2002.)
corniness
: the quality or state of being corny <a musical revue marked by banality and corniness>
corny
3 : using familiar and sterotyped formulas believed to appeal to the unsophisticated : TRITE <the American satirizing the Englishman and the Englishman satirizing the American reach their corniest and most obvious depths -- Stephen Potter> <a play full of corny music and corny jokes> : mawkishly sentimental <fantasy about a blue kitten ... in less talented hands ... could have been painfully corny -- Atlantic> : OLD-FASHIONED <TV sets are selling poorly because their styling is a little backward, sort of corny -- Time> : characterized by threadbare moralizing, exaggerated theatricality, or grandiose but commonplace sentiments <especially eloquent in a slightly corny way, with the wide gestures and grandiloquent intonations of a United States senator -- F.L.Allen>
geek
: a carnival performer often billed as a wild man whose act usually includes biting the head off a live chicken or snake.
outback vehicle
Usage: sometimes capitalized, often attributive
: the backcountry of Australia or New Zealand : 1BUSH 2c <outback life> <outback sheep stations> -- usually used with the when not attributive <bringing civilization to the outback>
mock-ups of "podules," fully wired instant buildings designed for stealthy government agencies (that's a picture of Donald Rumsfeld running a meeting in the full-scale version of the model sitting beneath it).
mock-up
a structural model built accurately to scale (as out of plywood, cardboard, canvas, clay) chiefly for study, testing, or display <a mock-up of an airplane>