CATTI笔译实务练习

CATTI笔译实务练习—寒假作业

Section A: Translation English into Chinese

Passage One

While there are almost as many definitions of history as there are historians, modern practice most closely conforms to one that sees history as the attempt to recreate and explain the significant events of the past．Caught in the web of its own time and place, each generation of historians determines anew what is significant for it in the past．In this search the evidence found is always incomplete and scattered, it is also frequently partial or partisan．The irony of the historian’s craft is that its practitioners always know that their efforts are but contributions to an unending process．

Interest in historical methods has arisen less through external challenge to the validity of history as an intellectual discipline and more from internal quarrels among historians themselves．While history once revered its affinity to literature and philosophy，the emerging social sciences seemed to afford greater opportunities for asking new questions and providing rewarding approaches to an understanding of the past．Social science methodologies had to be adapted to a discipline governed by the primacy of historical sources rather than the imperatives of the contemporary world. During this transfer，traditional historical methods were augmented by additional methodologies designed to interpret the new forms of evidence in the historical study. Methodology is a term that remains inherently ambiguous in the historical profession. There is no agreement whether methodology refers to the concepts peculiar to historical work in general or to the research techniques appropriate to the various branches of historical inquiry. Historians，especially those so blinded by their research interests that they have been accused of“tunnel method,”frequently fall victim to the “technicist fallacy.” Also common in the natural sciences，the technicist fallacy mistakenly identifies the discipline as a whole with certain parts of its technical implementation. It applies equally to traditional historians who view history as only the external and internal criticism of sources, and to social science historians who equate their activity with specific techniques.

Passage Two

New Technologies

Some new technologies are frightening from the start, and the need to establish political controls over their development and use is obvious to all. When the first atomic bomb was detonated at Alamogordo, New Mexico, in the summer of 1945, not one of the witnesses to this event failed to understand that a terrible new potential for destruction had been created.Nuclear weapons were thus from the very beginning tinged with political controls: Individuals could not freely develop nuclear technology on their own or traffic in the parts necessary to create

atomic bombs, and in time, nations that became signatories to the 1968 nonproliferation treaty agreed to control international trade in nuclear technology.

Other new technologies appear to be much more benign, and are consequently subject to little or no regulation. Personal computers and the Internet, for example, promised to create wealth, increase access to information, and foster community among their users. People have had to look hard for downsides to the information revolution. What they have found to date are issues like the so-called "digital divide" (i.e., inequality of access to information technology) and threats to privacy, neither of which qualify as earth-shaking matters of justice or morality. Despite occasional efforts on the part of the world's more statist societies to try to control the use of information technology, it has blossomed in recent years.

Biotechnology falls somewhere between these extremes. Transgenic crops and human genetic engineering make people far more uneasy than do personal computers or the Internet. But biotechnology also promises important benefits for human health and well-being. When presented with an advance like the ability to cure diabetes, it is hard for people to articulate reasons why their unease with the technology should stand in the way of progress. It is easiest to object to a new biotechnology if its development leads to a botched clinical trial or to a deadly allergic reaction to a genetically modified food. But the real threat of biotechnology lies in the possibilities of human cloning, “designer babies”--eugenic selection for intelligence, sex, and personality--and eventually, the end of the human species as such.

Passage Three

September is more than a month, really; it is a season, an achievement in itself. It begins with August’s leftovers and it ends with October’s preparations, but along the way it achieves special satisfactions. After s ummer’s heat and haste, the year consolidates itself. Deliberate September-in its own time and tempo-begins to sum up another summer.

With September comes a sense of autumn. It creeps in on a misty dawn and vanishes in the hot afternoon. It tiptoes through the treetops, rouging a few leaves, then rides a tuft of thistledown across the valley and away. It sits on a hilltop and hoots like an October owl in the dusk. It plays tag with the wind. September is a challenging busy as a squirrel in a hickory tree, i dle as a languid brook. It is summer’s ripeness and richness fulfilled.

Some of the rarest days of the year come in the September season-days when it is comfortably cold but pulsing with life, when the sky is clear and clean, the air crisp, the wind free of dust. Meadows still smell of hay and the sweetness of cut grass. September flowers are less varied than those of May but so abundant that they make September another flowery month. Goldenrod comes by mid-August, but rises to a peak of golden abundance in early September. Late thistles make spectacular purple accents. And asters blossom everywhere, along the roadsides, in meadows, on the hilltops, even in city lots, raging in color from pure white through all degrees of lavender to the royal New England purple.

We think of spring as the miracles time, when opening bud and new leaf proclaim the persistence of life. But September is when the abiding wonder makes itself know in a subtler way. Now growth comes to annual fruition, and preparations are completed for another year, another generation. The acorn ripens and the hickory nut matures. The plant commits its future to the seed and the root. The insect stows tomorrow in the egg and pupa. The surge is almost over and life begins to relax.

The green prime is passing. The trees begin to proclaim the change. Soon the leaves will be discarded, the grass will sere. But the miracle of life persists, the mysterious germ of growth and renewal that is the seed itself.

This is the season of the harvest moon. With reasonably clear skies it will be a moonlit week, for the harvest moon is not hasty; it comes early and stays late. There was a time when the busy farmer could return to the fields after supper and continue his harvest by moonlight. There’s still harvesting to be done, but much of it now centers on the Kitchen, the late sweet corn, the tomatoes, the root vegetables. The canning, the preserving, the freezing, the kitchen harvest in all its variety, reaches its peak.

First frost comes in the night, a clear, scant-starred night when the moon is near its fullness. It comes without a whisper, quiet as thistledown, brushing the corner of a hillside garden. Dawn comes and you see its path-the glistening leaf, the gloaming stem, the limp, blackening garden vine.

Another night or two the frost walks the valleys in the moonlight. Then it goes back beyond the northern hills to wait a little longer, and the golden mildness of early autumn comforts the land. A faint anise smell is on the air, goldenrod scent. The mist swirls and September sun shines through the deep-blue sky of September.

Section B: Translation Chinese into English

汉译英第一篇

1978年以前，中国只有单一的公有制经济，国有企业占77.6%，集体企业占22.4%。改革开放为多种经济成分的共同发展开辟了广阔空间，外商和港澳台商投资工业、个体和私营工业等其他经济成分如雨后春笋般迅猛发展。

国有企业改革始终是中国经济体制改革的中心环节。中国政府做了大量的各种各样的尝试，试图解决国有企业长期大面积亏损的问题。目前，中国国有企业的公司制改革已基本完成。经过股份制改造的国有企业，经济效益持续回升，总体实力和整体素质明显提高，对整个国民经济的控制力、影响力和带动力也不断增强。到2004年，全部国有工业企业及年产品销售收入500万元以上的非国有工业企业增加值中，国有及国有控股

企业占42.4%，集体企业占5.3%，其余份额为非公有制企业占有，包括外商投资企业、港澳台商投资企业，以及个体和私营企业，呈现出多种经济成分并存的活跃局面。

汉译英第二篇

雾遮没了正对着后窗一带山峰。这排列得很整齐的依稀分为三层的火球，衬着黑魑魑的山峰的背景，无论如何，是会引起非人间的缥缈的思想的。

但在白天看来，却就平凡得很。并排的五六个山峰，差不多高低，就只最西的一峰戴着一簇房子，其余的仅只有树；中间最大的一峰竟还有濯濯地一大块，像是癞子头上的疮疤。

现在那照例的晨雾把什么都遮没了，就是稍远的电线杆也躲得毫无影踪。渐渐地太阳光从浓雾中钻出来了。那也是可怜的太阳呢！光是那样的淡弱。随后它也躲开，让白茫茫的浓雾吞噬了一切，包围了大地。我诅咒这抹煞一切的雾！

我自然也讨厌寒风和冰雪。但和雾比较起来，我是宁愿后者呵！寒风和冰雪的天气能杀人，但也刺激人们活动起来奋斗。雾，雾呀，只使你苦闷；使你颓唐阑珊。

汉译英第三篇

著名的京剧人物钟馗的脸谱像是一只蝙蝠，因汉语中“蝙蝠”的“蝠”与“幸福”的“福”字发音相同，所以成了幸福的形象表意符号。

钟馗的故事有不同版本。流传最广的说法是，他在科举考试中高中榜首，但是因为相貌丑陋被取消了状元资格，一怒之下撞柱而死。玉帝怜其不幸，封他为捉恶鬼之神。与钟馗一同赴试的杜平出资安葬了他。钟馗感其恩德，将妹妹嫁给了杜平。钟馗既是法官又是执行者，他惩恶扬善。尽管钟馗的形象极为丑陋，但他仍是最受欢迎的神明之一。

钟馗脸谱中的蝙蝠造型意味着他给人们带来的福气，额头上红色元宝形，既表明他的忠正，也暗示他头撞柱而亡。黑白二色的图纹，强化他执法公正的涵义，而似带笑形的化妆手法，又反映了钟馗特有的幽默。