1、 翻译课材料: 历年(95-05)英语专业八级考试英译中试题 - 1 -历年(95-05)英语专业八级考试英译中试题 1995 年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, d
2、o the measurement 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 neighbours orchar
3、ds and gardens. There is the unpaid baby-sitter for whose children my daughter-in-law baby-sits in return, and neighbours who barter their skills and labour. But more than that, how do you measure serenity? Sense of self?I dont want to idealize life in small places. There are times when the outside
4、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 can
5、not 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.”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 del
6、ight. But these are, sadly, more exceptions than rules and are often overwhelmed by the awful corruptions and dangers that surround us.1996 年Four months before Election Day, five men gathered in a small conference room at the Reagan-Bush headquarters and reviewed an oversize calendar that marked the
7、 remaining days of the 1984 presidential campaign. It was the last Saturday in June and at ten oclock in the morning the rest of the office was practically deserted. Even so, the men kept the door shut and the drapes carefully drawn. The three principals and their two deputies had come from around t
8、he country for a critical meeting. Their aim was to devise a strategy that would guarantee Ronald Reagans resounding reelection to a second term in the White House.It should have been easy. They were battle-tested veterans with long ties to Reagan and even longer ties to the Republican Party, men wh
9、o understood presidential politics as well as any in the country. The backdrop of the campaign was hospitable, with lots of good news to work with: America was at peace, and the nations economy, a key factor in any election, was rebounding vigorously after recession. Furthermore, the campaign itself
10、 was lavishly financed, with plenty of money for a top-flight staff, travel, and television commercials. And, most important, their candidate was Ronald Reagan, a president of tremendous personal popularity and dazzling communication skills. Reagan has succeeded more than any president since John F.
11、 Kennedy in projecting a broad vision of Americaa nation of renewed military strength, individual initiative, and smaller federal government.1997 年Opera is expensive: that much is inevitable. But expensive things are not inevitably the province of the rich unless we abdicate societys power of choice
12、. 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? 翻译课材料: 历年(95-05)英语专业八级考试英译中试题 - 2 -Nobody denies the imperatives of food, shelter, defence, health and education. But even in a prehistoric cav
13、e, 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 fulfillment in the masterpieces of our music, art, liter
14、ature 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.1998 年I agree to some extent with my imagi
15、nary 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 over phrase of their literature to
16、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 too alternate between boasting of native products and copying those of the Continent. H
17、ow 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
18、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, t
19、houghts, 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 a
20、t 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 a sudden alienation, as when we hail a person across the str
21、eet, only to discover from his blank response that we have mistaken a stranger for a friend. 1999 年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 religiou
22、s rituals involving the family. Such reasons may seem thin in 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 mar
23、riage: 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 marriag
24、e 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 redemptiv
25、e 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 翻译课材料: 历年(95-05)英语专业八级考试英译中试题 - 3 -people,
26、 such a home base, in the literal sense, needs more than one person for sustenance and in generational extension.2000 年If people mean anything at all by the expression “untimely death”, they must believe that some deaths are on a better schedule than others. Death in old age is rarely called untimel
27、ya long life is thought to be a full one. But with the passing of a young person, one assumes that the best years lay ahead and the measure of that life was still to be taken. History denies this, of course. Among prominent summer deaths, one recalls those of MariLarry Monroe and James Deans, whose
28、lives seemed equally brief and complete. Writers cannot bear the fact that poet John Keats died at 26, and only half playfully judge their own lives as failures when they pass that year. The idea that the life cut short is unfulfilled is illogical because lives are measured by the impressions they l
29、eave on the world and by their intensity and virtue.2001 年Possession for its own sake or in competition with the rest of the neighborhood would have been Thoreaus idea of the low levels. The active discipline of heightening ones perception of what is enduring in nature would have been his idea of th
30、e high. What he saved from the low was time and effort he could spend on the high. Thoreau certainly disapproved of starvation, but he would put into feeding himself only as much effort as would keep him functioning for more important efforts.Effort is the gist of it. There is no happiness except as
31、 we take on life-engaging difficulties. Short of the impossible, as Yeats put it, the satisfaction we get from a lifetime depends on how high we choose our difficulties. Robert Frost was thinking in something like the same terms when he spoke of “The pleasure of taking pains”. The mortal flaw in the
32、 advertised version of happiness is in the fact that it purports to be effortless.We demand difficulty even in our games. We demand it because without difficulty there can be no game. A game is a way of making something hard of the fun of it. The rules of the game are an arbitrary imposition of diff
33、iculty. When someone ruins the fun, he always does so by refusing to play by the rules. It is easier to win at chess if you are free, at your pleasure, to change the wholly arbitrary rules, but the fun is in winning within the rules. No difficulty, no fun.2002 年The word “winner” and “loser” have man
34、y meanings. When we refer to a person as a winner, we do not mean one who makes someone else lose. To us, a winner is one who responds authentically by being credible, trustworthy, responsive, and genuine, both as an individual and as a member of a society.Winners do not dedicate their lives to a co
35、ncept of what they imagine they should be: rather, they are themselves and as such do not use their energy putting on a performance, maintaining pretence, and manipulating others. They are aware that there is a difference between being loving and acting loving, between being stupid and acting stupid
36、, between being knowledgeable and acting knowledgeable. Winners do not need to hide behind a mask.Winners are not afraid to do their own thinking and to use their own knowledge. They can separate facts from opinions and dont pretend to have all the answers. They listen to others, evaluate what they
37、say, but come to their own conclusions. Although winners can adore and respect other people, they are not totally defined, demolished, bound, or awed by them.翻译课材料: 历年(95-05)英语专业八级考试英译中试题 - 4 -Winners do not play “helpless”, nor do they play the blaming game. Instead, they assume responsibility for
38、their own lives.2003 年In his classic novel, “The Pioneers”, James, Feminore Cooper has his hero, a land developer, take his cousin on a tour of the city he is building. He describes the broad streets, rows of houses, a teeming metropolis. But his cousin looks around bewildered. All she sees is a for
39、est, “Where are the beauties and improvements which you were to show me?” she asks. Hes astonished she cant see them. “Where! Why everywhere,” he replies. For though they are not yet built on earth, he has built them in his mind, and they are as concrete to him as if they were already constructed an
40、d finished.Cooper was illustrating a distinctly American trait, future-mindedness: the ability to see the present from the vantage point of the future; the freedom to feel unencumbered by the past and more emotionally attached to things to come. As Albert Einstein once said, “Life for the American i
41、s always becoming, never being.”2004 年For me the most interesting thing about a solitary life, and mine has been that for the last twenty years, is that it becomes increasingly rewarding. When I can wake up and watch the sun rise over the ocean, as I do most days, and know that I have an entire day
42、ahead, uninterrupted, in which to write a few pages, take a walk with my dog, read and listen to music, I am flooded with happiness.I am lonely only when I am overtired , when I have worked too long without a break, when for the time being I feel empty and need filling up. And I am lonely sometimes
43、when I come back home after a lecture trip, when I have seen a lot of people and talked a lot, and am full to the brim with experience that needs to be sorted out.Then for a little while the house feels huge and empty, and I wonder where my self is hiding. It has to be recaptured slowly by watering
44、the plants and, perhaps, by looking again at each one as though it were a person.It takes a while, as I watch the surf blowing up in fountains, but the moment comes when the world falls away, and the self emerges again from the deep unconscious, bring back all I have recently experienced to be explo
45、red and slowly understood.2005 年It is simple enough to say that since books have classes- fiction, biography, poetry- we should separate them and take from each what it is right that each should give us. Yet few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurre
46、d and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning. Do not dictate
47、 to your author; try to become him. Be his fellow-worker and accomplice. If you hang back, and reserve and criticize at first, you are preventing yourself from getting the fullest possible value from what you read. But if you open your mind as widely as possible, then signs and hints of almost imperceptible fineness, from the twist and turn of the first sentences, will bring you into the presence of a human being unlike any other. Steep yourself in this, acquaint yourself with this, and soon you will find that your author is giving you, or attempting to give you, something far more definite.
