作文-翻译-练习

作文、翻译、改错练习

一、作文

说明：本学期作文所使用的样文都来自朱篱老师编写的、由北京外语教学与研究出版社即将出版的《英语专业八级考试最终测试》一书。这些样文文字流畅，文笔优美，文辞丰润。对许多学生来说，写出流畅优美的作文确非易事，但对样文中的一些用词用句可以吸纳之。另外要留心样文的写作套路（议论文或说明文）、段落衔接的手段和技巧、开头段的写法、句式的多样化、辞格的运用等，这样自己的作文才能有更好的成绩。

Privacy Endangered

George Orwell in his novel 1984 depicted a totalitarian state Oceania where the inhabitants are ruled by the dictator Big Brother. It is not the atrocities but the surveillance over people through telescreens that marks the rule of Big Brother. Everyone is watched by the Party and “Big Brother is watching you” is a constant reminder. George Orwell had intended his novel to be a science fiction, but unfortunately what was in George Orwell’s prefrontal cortex has become a reality in the 21st century when people’s privacy is flagrantly violated.

One violation of personal privacy results from the information age and the digital technologies. In processing computer information and using digital technologies we at the same time give away everything about ourselves. Not long ago a computer hacker got access to people’s names, addresses, email address, passwords, logins, and more on Sony’s PlayStation with millions of customer accounts exposed. Even if you are very careful about your personal information, you can still be victimized as far as your behaviors, preferences, or habits are concerned. Google, for example, keeps tabs at everything that you do with the search engine. Through the use of cookies, Google records your Internet IP address, the time and date, your search terms, and your browser configurations. It is no exaggeration that Google is Big Brother writ large.

Even if you are digitally reclusive, you are not safe. In the name of preventing crimes, many cities have mounted surveillance cameras in public places. London’s CCTV (clos ed-circuit television) makes it one of the most monitored cities in the world. China has installed a whopping three million surveillance cameras with about three surveillance cameras for every 1000 people in the country. It is true that surveillance cameras can deter crimes in public places, but at the same time people are mercilessly exposed before the camera. Everyone has seen the camera shot posted on the Internet of a male driver fondling a woman’s breast while driving. Of course the man’s action is a breach of decency, but the fact that the photo was leaked out constitutes a breach of personal privacy. Isn’t it creepy that when you make out in the street someone at the other end of the camera takes a voyeuristic peek?

Although the protection of personal privacy is not written into the constitution, the tacit knowledge is that privacy is something to be respected if not safeguarded. As our lives become more digitized, which is supposed to build a customized world for each individual, our privacy, paradoxically, is endangered, and privacy will increasingly become an endangered species.

评语：这是一篇说明文。作者通过George Orwell的作品1984引出文章主题，非常自然。段落之间的衔接没有使用连词，而是通过文章的内在逻辑，例如第二段的violation和第一段进行衔接，第三段的digitally和第二段进行衔接。文章例证充分。文章的修辞手段包括metonymy（prefrontal cortex是指大脑和想象力有关的部分，用来代表Orwell 的想象力），

repetition和parallelism（breach of decency, breach of personal privacy），rhetorical question （Isn’t it creepy that when you make out in the street someone at the other end of the camera takes a voyeuristic peek?）metaphor（endangered species）等。

First Impressions Don’t Count

In everyday life, it is inevitable that we encounter unknown people. To get to know these people, some rely on their first impressions, convinced that they are generally correct. Others, however, take the opposite position, believing that first impressions are often deceptive and, therefore, unreliable. For my part, I couldn’t agree more with the latter.

As a famous saying goes, “you can’t judge a book by its cover.” Perhaps, at no other time does this saying sound more true than in today’s world, where interpersonal relationships are becoming increasingly complex. More often than not, what you get in your first encounter is contrary to what you uncover as time goes on. For example, TV dating shows are all the craze nowadays, but they are just cheap entertainment without really serving the function of successfully pairing people off. Participants make themselves out to be as presentable as possible with careful attention to their appearance, their language, and their demeanor. But once we get to the bottom of personality, values and habits, we see little correlation between the two.

Moreover, granting that our first impressions are correct sometimes, they often fail to tell a person fully. Let’s suppose a situation where a job applicant goes for an interview. Either because he is not in the mood or because he is nervous, he may project to the interviewer a false persona, far removed from his real performance and personality. Can we jump to the conclusion that he is not a suitable candidate simply because he happens to have got up on the wrong side of the bed or suffer “stage fright”?

Finally, first impressions are extremely unreliable when they are associated with myths and stereotypes. We tend to think that a bespectacled person is learned and therefore cultivated, a pretty girl is dumb, and a person dressed unconventionally can be wildly nonconformist. This kind of associations don’t bear scrutiny, however, when countless examples are offered to the contrary. My classmate, Lucy, is a stunning beauty, and she is not spectacled, and she is avant-garde as far as dressing is concerned. But she is a high achiever and has become the buff of envy in our class.

Someone may argue that in today’s fast-paced world it is crucial to make quick judgments so as to grab opportunities or save lives. But we should not forget that, while intuition and quick judgments sometimes do make a difference to one’s opportunities or life-and-death matters, gut feelings and snap judgments are highly unreliable because of the masks, false persona and stereotypes.

评语：这是一篇议论文。该文句式多样（下划线部分），用词优美（all the craze（风靡），make out（假装），get to the bottom of（弄明白），bear scrutiny（经得起检验），buff（对象，目标），gut feeling（直觉），snap judgment（草率的决定））。

更多开头段的写法

Is college education necessary? This question has generated heated debates. Some hold the view that post-middle school education is a stepping stone to success, while others contend that independent learning can also lead to a fulfilling life. Personally, I go along with the second camp, believing that college education is not the course that everyone has to take.（议论文）

Recently a TV commentator has made a splash by criticizing the graduate studies here in China. He believes that students continue with graduate studies in order to avoid a competitive job market and, instead of pursuing academic research, they just sit for another round of college studies and examinations. Nothing is further from the truth. In my opinion, students choose graduate studies because such studies offer them many benefits. （议论文）

The word “education” often conjures up the idea of getting knowledge through educational establishments like schools and universities, and this kind of education takes up a certain chunk of one’s life rather than spreads across one’s entire lifetime. However, since the time of Plato, education has been seen as a process that is not limited to a certain period of time but occurs in stages throughout one’s life, and the words of Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust couldn’t highlight more the fact that education is for a lifetime. （说明文）（哈佛校长的原话是：Education should prepare people for a lifetime, not just a single career.）

2009年考生真题作文（18分）

It was recently reported that employees at subway stations in a large city was going to adopt various dialects as their service languages, in an effort to facilitate services provided to passengers from all over the country. I find these efforts unnecessary, and I think that dialects are by no means acceptable in public places.

First and foremost, it is known to all that mandarin is the standard service sector language throughout the country, and that the promotion of mandarin has so far brought about many advantages to every facet of everyday life. It is much more convenient to communicate with others in mandarin, which is known to both parities of the conversation, than in dialects, which inevitably causes inequality and breaks the balance. What’s more, the wide use of mandarin serves to facilitate, and thus accelerate, the development of our society in that it makes communications smoother and easier.

Some may argue that speaking dialects plays a vital role in preserving traditional cultures and their special features. It is all right to speak dialects, but not in public. One should be aware that dialects are, in nature, quite private and that it is often considered inadequate to speak out dialects loud in face of many other people who possibly have no idea what exactly you are saying, and who are thus somewhat insulted. Those who assert the justification of dialects in public, actually, forget about the borderline between public discourses and private ones.

It is all the more far-fetched to argue that speaking dialects in serving customers provides better service. It is not possible for one to learn to speak all the languages around the world, and it is the same case with dialects. Learning all the major dialects spoken around the country involves quite an odyssey, if not a sheer disaster. Then, what if an employee at subway station meets with two passengers from Shanxi and Guangdong respectively at the same time, and if he only knows how to speak Cantonese to provide service？It will, for sure, cause discrepancies, thus resulting in unfairness.

In a word, it is not acceptable to speak dialects, where one should speak mandarin. For those who have an intimate bond with their born dialects, maybe they could be very kind to speak them indoors, rather than out in the street.

评语：这是篇议论文。该考生语言功底深厚，文字流畅，表达地道，组句能力突出，词汇量丰富。

二、翻译

中译英

在纽约地铁里没有人说话，没有旁若无人、声贯车厢的交谈，更没有肆无忌惮的浪谝和浪笑。偶尔有相识的人打招呼或说点什么，也是轻微到只让对方听见就行了。据说，美国法律没有关于在地铁里大声喧哗违法的条律。大家都不说话，显然不是美国人生性寡言，也不是法律制约或罚款强迫制裁的结果，那是一种社会生活的无形的公约，自然的习惯，个人的修养。（翻译方法包括分译法、抽象译法、意译法、省译法、合译法、转性译法等。）

英译中

The age at which young children begin to make moral discriminations about harmful actions committed against themselves has been the focus of recent research into the moral development of children. Until recently, child psychologists supported pioneer developmentalist Jean·Piaget in his hypothesis that because of their immaturity, children under age seven do not take into account the intentions of a person committing accidental or deliberate harm, but rather simply assign punishment for transgressions on the basis of the magnitude of the negative consequences caused. Children under age seven occupy the first stage of moral development, which is characterized by moral absolutism (rules made by authorities must be obeyed) and imminent justice (if rules are broken, punishment will be meted out).Until young children mature, their moral judgments are based entirely on the effect rather than the cause of a transgression.（具体的翻译方法包括分译法、转性译法、增译法、省译法、转句法、缩句译法、正反译法等。）

三、改错

Fashion is a powerful cultural and economic influence in

developed societies. Just as men compete with one other so do (1) __________ women. Women want to stand out and are noticed. To wear (2) __________ something beautiful, if not outrageous, does just this. It gives a

woman a competitive advantage with the regard to other women. (3) __________

The most bright coloured and scented flowers in the otherwise (4) __________ verdant green of a tropical jungle tend to attract the most visits from

potential insect pollinations. How many women, when they ask (5) __________ another woman what she is wearing to a function, do because (6) __________

they want to make sure they are wearing the same thing? To be

fashionable is also an indication of status because, initially in any

case, designer wearing is expensive and beyond the reach of most. (7) __________

It indicates status, power, and access to resources. Fashion, initially

outrageous, is then copied by other women so that in definition (8) __________

it becomes less outrageous and more the norm. However, the (9) __________ boundary keeps moving far back so that the outrageous (10) __________

has to become even more extreme.

（改错考查的内容包括：词汇知识，固定短语即搭配，句法知识、上下文逻辑。在做题时一定要了解短文的内容，理解每个句、词的意思，有意识地查找词汇错误（词义和词形错误）、固定短语即搭配错误、语法错误、上下文逻辑错误、多词、少词等。