英汉翻译 练习题

Exercise for Advanced English-Chinese Translation 2-21 (Changing and adding)Sensitive souls: How dogs became man’s best friendNo species has developed a closer relationship with humanity than the dog. (Though cat-lovers may disagree.) But that relations hip‘s basis—what it is about dogs that allows them to live at ease with people—is still little understood. After all, dogs are descended from wolves, which are big, scary carnivores that would certainly have competed with early man for prey, and might not have been averse to the occasional human as a light snack.Unless specifically bred for fighting, dogs are more docile than wolves, so that is clearly part of the answer. But mere docility cannot account for why people like to have dogs in their homes. Sheep are docile, but few people keep them as pets.Brian Hare, of Harvard University, thinks he knows. And, as he told the AAAS meeting in Seattle, it does not reflect well on the intelligence of mankind‘s closest living relative, the chimpanzee. Dr Hare‘s h ypothesis is that dogs are superbly sensitive to social cues from people. That enables them to fit in with human society. On one level, this might sound common sense. But humans are such sociable animals that they frequently fail to realize just how unusual are their own skills at communicating. Dr Hare therefore decided to test his idea by comparing the abilities of dogs with those of chimpanzees, which are often regarded as second only to people in their level of innate intelligence.His experiment was simple. He presented his animal subjects with two inverted cups. Then he hid the cups behind a screen, put a small piece of food under on of them, and took the screen away. The animal had to choose which cup to look under. If the experimenter gave no clue, both species got it right 50% of the time, as what would be expected. However, if he signaled in some way which was the right cup, by pointing at it, tapping it, or even just gazing at it, a dog would choose correctly every time, while a chimpanzee would still do only slightly better than chance. Chimps simply did not get the idea of social signals of this sort. However many times the experiment was repeated.Having established, to his own satisfaction at least, that his hypothesis was correct, Dr Hare asked the next logical question—how did this skill originate? He had three more hypotheses. （392）2 How to Avoid Foolish OpinionsBertrand RusselTo avoid the various foolish opinions to which mankind is prone, no superhuman genius is required. A few simple rules will keep you, not from all error, but from silly error.If the matter is one that can be settled by observation, make the observation yourself. Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted. He did not do so because he thought he knew. Thinking that you know when in fact you don‘t is a fatal mistake, to which we are all prone. I believe myself that hedgehogs eat black beetles, because I have been told that they do; but if I were writing a book on the habits of hedgehogs, I should not commit myself until I had seen one enjoying this unappetizing diet. Aristotle, however, was less cautious. Ancient and medieval authors knew all about unicorns and salamanders; not one of them thought it necessary to avoid dogmatic statements about them because he had never seen one of them.Many matters, however, are less easily brought to the test of experience. If, like most of mankind, you have passionate convictions on many such matters, there are ways in which you can make yourself aware of your own bias. If an opinion contrary to your own makes you angry, that is a sign that you are subconsciously aware of having no good reason for thinking as you do. If someone maintains that two and two are five, or that Iceland is on the equator, you feel pity rather than anger, unless you know so little of arithmetic or geography that his opinion shakes your own contrary conviction. The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way. Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic, because in arithmetic there is knowledge, but in theology there is only opinion. So whenever you find yourself getting angry about a difference of opinion, be on your guard; you will probably find, on examination, that your belief is going beyond what the evidence warrants.A good way of riding yourself of certain kinds of dogmatism is to become aware of opinions held in social circles different from your own. When I young, I lived much outside my own country—in France, Germany, Italy, the United States. I found this very profitable in diminishing the intensity of insular prejudice. If you cannot travel, seek out people with whom you disagree, and read a newspaper belonging to a party that is not yours. If the people and the newspaper seem mad, perverse, and wicked, remind yourself that you seem so to them. In this opinion both parties may be right, but they cannot both be wrong. This reflection should generate a certain caution.For those who have enough psychological imagination, it is a good plan to imagine an argument with a person having a different bias. This has one advantage, and only one, as compared with actual conversation with opponents; this one advantage is that the method is not subject to the same limitations of time and space. Mahatma Gandhi deplored railways and steamboats and machinery; he would have liked to undo the whole of the industrial revolution. You may never have an opportunity of actually meeting any one who holds this opinion, because in Western countries most people take the advantages of modern technique for granted. But if you want to make sure that you are right in agreeing with the prevailing opinion, you will find it a good plan to test the arguments that occur to you by considering what Gandhi might have said in refutation of them. I have sometimes been led actually to change my mind as a result of this kind of imaginary dialogue, and, short of this, I have frequently found myself growing less dogmatic and cocksure through realizing the possible reasonableness of a hypothetical opponent.Be very wary of opinions that flatter your self-esteem. Both men and women, nine times out of ten, are firmly convinced of the superior excellence of their own sex. There is abundant evidence on both sides. If you are a man, you can point out that most poets and men of science are male; if you are a woman, you can retort that so are most criminals. The question is inherently insoluble, but self-esteem conceals this from most people. We are all, whatever part of the world we come from, persuaded that our own nation is superior to all others. Seeing that each nation has its characteristic merits and demerits, we adjust our standard of values so as to make out that the merits possessed by our nation are the really important ones, while its demerits are comparatively trivial. Here, again, the rational man will admit that the question is one to which there is no demonstrably right answer. It is more difficult to deal with the self-esteem of man as man, because we cannot argue out the matter with some non-human mind. The only way I know of dealing with this general human conceit is to remind ourselves that man is a brief episode in the life of a small planet in a little corner of the universe, and that for aught we know, other parts of the cosmos may contain beings as superior to ourselves as we are to jelly-fish.3Nobel Prize Acceptance SpeechI feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work -- a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before.So this award is only mine in trust.It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing.Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed -- love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.4阅读A及其译文，然后翻译BA:I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. Being in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I have never found a companion that was as friendly as solitude. We are for the most part lonelier when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our homes. A man thinking or working is always alone. Solitude is not measured by themiles of space that intervene between a man and his fellow men. The really diligent student in one of the crowded rooms of a college is solitary as a hermit in the desert. The farmer can work alone in the field or the woods all day, weeding or chopping, and not feel lonesome, because he is employed. But when he comes home at night, he cannot be alone. He must be where he can ―see the folks,‖ and, he thinks, repay himself for his day‘s solitude. So he wonders how the student can sit alone in the house all night and most of the day without boredom and the ―blues,‖ but he does not realize that the student, although in the house, is still at work in his field, and chopping in his woods.（214 Henry David Thoreau, Walden）独处为主，有益身心；这是我的体会。