英语笔译3习题集

英语笔译（3） E-C

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I, by comparison, living in my overpriced city apartment, walking to work past putrid sacks of street garbage, paying usurious taxes to local and state governments I generally abhor, I am rated middle class. This causes me to wonder, do the measurements make sense? Are we measuring only that which is easily measured – the numbers on the money chart – and ignoring values more central to the good life? For my sons there is of course the rural bounty of fresh-grown vegetables, line-caught fish and the shared riches of neighbors’ orchards and gardens. There is unpaid babysitter for whose children my daughter-in-law baby-sits in return, and neighbors who barter their skills and labor. But more than that, how do you measure serenity? Sense of self? I don’t want to idealize life in small places. There are times when the outside world intrudes brutally, as when the cost of gasoline goes up or developers cast their eyes on untouched farmland. There are cruelties, there is intolerance, there are all the many vices and meannesses in small places that exist in large cities. Furthermore, it is harder to ignore them when they cannot be banished psychologically to another part of town or excused as the whims of alien groups – when they have to be acknowledged as “part of us.” （148 words）

Nor do I want to belittle the opportunities for small decencies in cities – the eruptions of one-stranger-to-another caring that always surprise and delight. But these are, sadly, more exceptions than rules and are often overwhelmed by the awful corruptions and dangers that surround us. 2.

Opera is expensive: that much is inevitable. But expensive things are not inevitably the province of the rich unless we abdicate society’s power of choice. We can choose to make opera, and other expensive forms of culture, accessible to those who cannot individually pay for it. The question is: why should we? Nobody denies the imperatives of food, shelter, defence, health and education. But even in a prehistoric cave, mankind stretched out a hand not just to eat, drink or fight, but also to draw. The impulse towards culture, the desire to express and explore the world through imagination and representation is fundamental. In Europe, this desire has found fulfilment in the masterpieces of our music, art, literature and theatre. These masterpieces are the touchstones for all our efforts; they are the touchstones for the possibilities to which human thought and imagination may aspire; they carry the most profound messages that can be sent from one human to another. (195 words) 3.

I agree to some extent with my imaginary English reader. American literary historians are perhaps prone to view their own national scene too narrowly, mistaking prominence for uniqueness. They do over-phrase their own literature, or certainly its minor figures. And Americans do swing from aggressive overphrase of their literature to an equally unfortunate, imitative deference. But then, the English themselves are somewhat insular in their literary appraisals. Moreover, in fields where they are not pre-eminent – e.g. in painting and music – they

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too alternate between boasting of native products and copying those of the Continent. How many English paintings try to look as though they were done in Paris; how many times have we read in articles that they really represent an “English tradition” after all.

To speak of American literature, then, is not to assert that it is completely unlike that of Europe. Broadly speaking, America and Europe have kept step. At any given moment the traveler could find examples in both of the same architecture, the same styles in dress, the same books on the shelves. Ideas have crossed the Atlantic as freely as men and merchandise, though sometimes more slowly. When I refer to American habit, though6ts, etc., I intend some sort of qualification to precede the word, for frequently the difference between America and Europe (especially England) will be one of degree, sometimes only of a small degree. The amount of divergence is a subtle affair, liable to perplex the Englishman when he looks at America. He is looking at a country which in important senses grew out of his own, which in several ways still resembles his own – and which is yet a foreign country. There are odd overlappings and abrupt unfamiliarities; kinship yields to sudden alienation, as when we hail a person across the street, only to discover from his blank response that we have mistaken a stranger for a friend. (191 words) 4.

In some societies people want children for what might be called familial reasons: to extend the family line or the family name, to propitiate the ancestors; to enable the proper functioning of religious rituals involving the family. Such reasons may seem thin the modern, secularized society but they have been and are powerful indeed in other places.

In addition, one class of family reasons shares a border with the following category, namely, having children in order to maintain or improve a marriage; to hold the husband or occupy the wife; to repair or rejuvenate the marriage; to increase the number of children on the assumption that family happiness lies that way. The point is underlined by its converse: in some societies the failure to bear children (or males) is a threat to the marriage and a ready cause for divorce. Beyond all that is the profound significance of children to the very institution of the family itself. To many people, husband and wife alone do not seem a proper family – they need children to enrich the circle, to validate its family character, to gather the redemptive influence of offspring. Children need the family, but the family seems also to need children, as the social institution uniquely available, at least in principle, for security, comfort, assurance, and direction in a changing, often hostile, world. To most people, such a home base, in the literal sense, needs more than one person for sustenance and in generational extension. (166 words) 5.

Every day, newspapers, magazines, and television fill our eyes and ears with reports about the world: The unemployment rate is down four-tenths of a percent; another candidate has declared her intention to run; the space shuttle completes a successful mission i guerrillas claim responsibility for an attack on a refugee settlement. We rarely question such information; instead, we accord it the status of fact by making two crucial assumptions: that such stories could be verified if we wanted to check into them and that the sources who deliver them have no intent to deceive us.

Yet behind the simplest news story lie definitions, perceptions, and categories that could

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become sources of different views by equally competent hearers and observers, that could, in other words, spawn arguments maintaining different views of reality. We can make this point more clearly by looking at our sample news items cited above. The unemployment rate, for example, is an extremely complex indicator; reporting procedures can and do change such a figure. If, for instance, only those actively looking for work are counted among the unemployed, then the figure will not indicate those who have despaired of finding work and those who have never tried. Those who are working part time and wish to be working full time also may not be included. Thus the “fact” of an increase or decrease in the rate of unemployment may not be such a fact after all; much depends on a definition of the “unemployed”. (151 words, 30 min.) 6.

The thirty-second day out of Bombay began inauspiciously. In the morning a sea smashed one of the galley doors. We dashed in through lots of steam and found the cook very wet and indignant with the ship: “She's getting worse every day. She’s trying to drown me in front of my own stove!” He was very angry. We pacified him, and the carpenter, though washed away twice from there, managed to repair the door. Through that accident our dinner was not ready till late, but it didn’t matter in the end because Knowles, who went to fetch it, got knocked down by a sea and the dinner went over the side. Captain Allistoun, looking more hard and thin-lipped than ever, hung on to full topsails and foresail, and would not notice that the ship, asked to do too much, appeared to lose heart altogether for the first time since we knew her. (159 words, 30 min) 7．

Schubert’s Serenade Henry and Dana Lee Thomas

Schubert continued his solitary dreams among the stars. Poverty, disillusionment, disease could not still his music. Many a time he had declared that he would never write another song. He was tired of scattering his treasures to the fickle winds. But he never stopped. Sitting at the tavern amidst the clatter of ninepins and the laughter of the drinkers, he would suddenly snatch up a menu and dash off upon the back of it a melody that bubbled like wine out of his overflowing heart.

One day a friend asked him to set to music the words of a little poem he had composed for a young lady's birthday. Schubert, who knew nothing of the young lady, scribbled down a handful of notes and gave them to his friend with an apology, “Sorry, but I haven’t the time for anything more serious just now.” His friend took the music home and tried it on the piano. He was so delighted with it that he made arrangements to have Schubert play it at the home of a mutual friend before a select circle of music lovers.

At the appointed hour everybody was there -- except Schubert. The composer was nowhere to be found. The hostess was beside herself. She sent one of Schubert’s companions to search all the beer taverns in town, certain that he would be found in some isolated corner, sipping his beverage and shaping his dreams. She was right. Schubert was discovered in one of his favorite haunts. Dragged unceremoniously to the drawing room, he confessed that he had forgotten all about the appointment. He sat down and played the song he had scribbled for his friend in such a hurry. When he had finished playing, the tears came into his eyes. “ I hadn’t realized it was so beautiful,”

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he said.

The name of the song? Schubert’s Serenade! (320 words, 50 min.)

8．Down into the Deep-- Using high tech to explore the Titanic

After resting on the ocean floor, split asunder and rusting, for nearly three quarters of a century, a great ship seemed to come alive again. The saga of the White Star Liner Titanic, which struck an iceberg and sank on its maiden voyage in 1912,carrying more than 1,500 passengers to their deaths, has been celebrated in print and on film, in poetry and song. But last week what had been legendary suddenly became real. As they viewed videotapes and photographs of the sunken leviathan, millions of people around the world could sense her mass, her eerie quiet and the ruined splendor of a lost age.

Watching on television, they vicariously joined the undersea craft Alvin and Jason Jr. as they toured the wreckage of the luxury liner, wandering across the decks past corroded bollards, peering into the officers’ quarters and through rust-curtained portholes. Views of the railings where doomed passengers and crewmembers stood evoked images of the moonless night 74 years ago when the great ship slipped beneath the waves.

The two-minutes videotape and nine photographs, all in colour and shot 12,500 ft. under the North Atlantic, were a tiny sample of the 60 hours of video and 60,000 stills garnered during the twelve-day exploration. They were released at a Washington press conference conducted by Marine Geologist Robert Ballard, 44,who led the teams from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution that found the Titanic last September and revisited it this July.

Recounting the highlights of what has already become the most celebrated feat of underwater exploration, Ballard revealed some startling new information. His deep-diving craft failed to find the 300 ft. gash that, according to legend, was torn in the Titanic’s hull when the ship plowed into the iceberg. Instead, he suggested, the collision had buckled the ship’s plates, allowing water to pour in. He also brought back evidence that the ship broke apart not when she hit bottom, as he had thought when viewing the first Titanic images last September, but as she sank, the stern, which settled on the bottom almost 1,800 ft. from the bow, had swiveled 180° on its way down. (365 words) 9．

Japanese Ability to Use English

In international meetings Japanese ability in the language of the conference, which usually is English, likely ranks near the bottom among the participants. Inevitably the voice of Japan seems less loud and distinct than it should be. This is a sorry state of affairs for a country so great in economic size and so overwhelmingly dependent on its international relations.

There are a number of reasons for this blind spot. One is that Japan has traditionally thought of contact with other cultures as being through the written word, not as two-way oral communication. There even seemed an advantage in not communicating with foreigners, and in keeping them from learning about Japan and what was in the minds of Japanese.

The great majority of Japanese have little appreciation of the drawbacks of this situation. They are not aware that Japan is intellectually isolated, or that to others it sometimes appears to be a tongue-tied giant or a sinister outsider. Only slowly have they begun to realize the need for others to understand Japan better and for Japanese to know more about the rest of the world. For

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