综合英语2部分课文翻译

2021年2月13日发(作者：樱)

The Virtues of Growing Older

（长大变老有好处）

Our society worships youth. Advertisements convince us to buy Grecian

Formula and Oil of Olay so we can hide the gray in our hair and smooth the

lines on our face. Television shows feature attractive young stars with firm

bodies, perfect complexions, and thick manes of hair. Middle-aged folks work

out in gyms and jog down the street, trying to delay the effects of age.

我们所处的社会崇尚年轻。连篇累牍的广告劝我们买希腊配方的洗发水和玉兰油，这样

的话，白发无处可寻，面部的皱纹也能被抚平。电视节目上尽是体魄强健，肤色无暇，头发

浓密的年轻明星。而中年人则在体育馆里锻炼，在马路上慢跑，尽量不让岁月过早地留下痕< /p>

迹。

Wouldn't any person over thirty gladly sign with the devil just to be young

again? Isn't aging an experience to be dreaded? Perhaps it is unAmerican to

say so, but I believe the answer is

being older has distinct advantages.

不是所有三十出头的人都会为了重获青春而心甘情愿地与魔鬼 订立合约吗？长大变老难

道不可怕吗？说它不可怕可能不是美国人的回答，但我却认为长 大变老不可怕。青春年少令

人愉悦，但长大变老也有明显的好处。

When young, you are apt to be obsessed with your appearance. When my

brother Dave and I were teens, we worked feverishly to perfect the bodies we

had. Dave lifted weights, took megadoses of vitamins, and drank a half-dozen

milk shakes a day in order to turn his wiry adolescent frame into some

muscular ideal. And as a teenager, I dieted constantly. No matter what I

weighed, though, I was never satisfied with the way I looked. My legs were too

heavy, my shoulders too broad, my waist too big. When Dave and I were

young, we begged and pleaded for the

them for us, we felt our world would fall apart. How could we go to school

wearing loose-fitting blazers when everyone else would be wearing smartly

tailored leather jackets? We could be considered freaks. I often wonder how

my parents, and parents in general, manage to tolerate their children during

the adolescent years. Now, however, Dave and I are beyond such adolescent

agonies. My rounded figure seems fine, and don't deny myself a slice of pecan

pie if I feel in the mood. Dave still works out, but he has actually become fond

of his tall, lanky frame. The two of us enjoy wearing fashionable clothes, but

we are no longer slaves to style. And women, I'm embarrassed to admit, even

more than men, have always seemed to be at the mercy of fashion. Now my

clothes ---- and my brother's ---- are attractive yet easy to wear. We no longer

feel anxious about what others will think. As long as we feel good about how

we look, we are happy.

年轻时，你可能为你的外形伤脑筋。我兄弟戴维和我十来岁时拼命锻炼以健美体形。戴

维练举重，大量服用维生素，一天喝上半打奶昔，目的是想让他瘦长的体形变得想象中那般

肌肉发达。我在十来岁时坚持节食。但不管我体重是多少，都对自己的外形不满意。我嫌自< /p>

己腿太结实，肩膀太阔，腰围太大。那时候，戴维和我都缠着父母，央求他们买

< p>
“

合适

”

的衣

< p>
服。如果父母没给买的话，我们就觉得自己的世界要崩塌了一样。我们怎么好穿着松松垮垮

的运动衣去上学，别人可是穿着款式时髦的皮夹克啊！人家会把我们当怪人来看的。我常常

纳闷：我的父母和大多数的父母怎能如此纵容他们的小孩子。但现在戴维和我都已度过了痛

苦的青少年时期。如今我圆鼓鼓的身躯看上去也不坏，只要我喜欢，我也不会不让自己吃上< /p>

一块核桃馅饼。戴维还在坚持运动，只不过他真的喜欢上了自己瘦长的体形。我们两人还是

喜欢穿时髦衣服，只是我们不再是流行时尚的奴隶。这一点我不得不承认，女人似乎要比 男

人更容易为流行时尚所左右。现在我的衣服，还有戴维的衣服都漂亮大方，我们不再为 别人

怎么想而感觉不安了。只要我们对自己的形象感觉不坏，就很开心。

Being older is preferable to being younger in another way. Obviously, I

still have important choices to make about my life, but I have already made

many of the critical decisions that confront those just starting out. I chose the

man I wanted to marry. I decided to have children. I elected to return to college

to complete my education. But when you are young, major decisions await you

at every turn.

Should I get married? Should I have children?

issues facing young people. It's no wonder that, despite their carefree facade,

they are often confused, uncertain, and troubled by all the unknowns in their

future.

从另一个方面来看，年老比年轻要好。很明显，我还要就我的生活作一些重要的决定，

但我已经作了许多很重要的决定，而年轻人生活刚刚起步，他们还面临着选择。我选择了我

丈夫，我选择了生育孩子，我选择了回到大学完成我的教育。但当你还年轻时，你的每一次< /p>

转折都等待你作出决定。

“

我该上哪所大 学？我该做什么工作？我是否要结婚？我是否该要孩

子？

”

这几个问题还只是年轻人面临的问题当中的一部分。

这就难怪为什么 年轻人外表无忧无

虑，而事实上迷茫困惑，缺乏信心，为将来的种种未知因素而忧心忡忡 。

But the greatest benefit of being forty is knowing who I am. The most

unsettling aspect of youth is the uncertainty you feel about your values, goals,

and dreams. Being young means wondering what is worth working for. Being

young means feeling happy with yourself one day and wishing you were never

born the next. It means trying on new selves by taking up with different crowds.

It means resenting your parents and their way of life one minute and then

feeling you will never be as good or as accomplished as they are. By way of

contrast, forty is sanity. I have a surer self-identity now. I don't laugh at jokes I

don't think are funny. I can make a speech in front of a town meeting or

complain in a store because I am no longer terrified that people will laugh at

me; I am no longer anxious that everyone must like me. I no longer blame my

parents for my every personality quirk or keep a running score of everything

they did wrong raising me. Life has taught me that I, not they, am responsible

for who I am. We are all human beings

—

neither saints nor devils.

但人到四十的最大好处便是知道我自己究竟是谁。年轻时最令 人不安的就是不清楚自己

的价值、目标和梦想。年轻就意味着你不知道什么值得做。年轻 意味着你在今天非常开心而

明天就宁愿自己没来过这个世界。年轻还意味着你会在某一刻 怨恨你的父母和他们的生活方

式，紧接着又感到永远不会像他们那么好那么成功。相比之 下，四十岁代表着理智。我现在

更清楚自己是谁。

对自己认为无 趣的笑话，

我不会勉强自己笑；

我可以在全城的人面前演讲，< /p>

也可以在商店里发牢骚，因为我不再担心人们会取笑我；我不会着急讨别人喜欢，我不会为

自己古怪的脾性而抱怨父母，也不会列举不该生养我的种种原因。生活教会了我这一点： 我

是谁，这该我自己负责，而不是我父母。父母和我既非圣贤，也非妖魔，我们只是普普 通通

的人。

Most Americans blindly accept the idea that newer is automatically

better. But a human life contradicts this premise. There is a great deal of

happiness to be found as we grow older. My own parents, now in their sixties,

recently told me that they are happier now than they have ever been. They

would not want to be my age. Did this surprise me? At first, yes. Then it

gladdened me. Their contentment holds out great promise for me as I move

into the next ---- perhaps even better ---- phase of my life.

大多数美国人盲目相信新的一定就更好。但人生与这一假设相左。随着年龄 的增长，我

们发现生活大有乐趣。我的父母已年过六十，他们最近对我说他们现在比以往 任何时候都幸

福。他们不想回到我这个岁数。这出乎我的意料了吗？是的，一开始这确实 令我吃惊。但随

即却让我高兴。他们的满足昭示着我的未来人生充满希望，甚至可能更好 。

Cultural Encounters

We live in an age of easy access to the rest of the world. Cheap flights

mean that millions of people are able to visit places their parents could only

dream about, while the Internet enables us to communicate with the remotest

places and the traditional postal services are now referred to almost mockingly

as

parents from Internet cafes in the Himalayas or from a desert oasis. And as for

mobile phones

—

the clicking of text messaging at any hour of the day or night

has become familiar to us all. Everyone, it seems, provided, of course, they

can afford to do so, need never be out of touch.

我们生活在一个交流非常便捷的时代便 宜的机票使得我们可以到那些我们的家长只能

幻想的地方去，而网络使得我们可以跟最遥 远地方的人们进行交流。在这种情况下，传统邮

政现在被称为蜗牛邮件系统。当学生们在 背包远足的时候，他们可以用

E-MAIL

从喜马拉雅

的网吧或者从沙漠里的绿洲给他们的家长发邮件。不管是白天还是晚上，我们也能通过手机

来发短信。所有可以付的起这种方式的人都可以随时随地的获取最新信息。

Significantly also, this great global communications revolution is also

linked to the expansion of English, which has now become the leading

international language. Conferences and business meetings around the globe

are held in English, regardless of whether anyone present is a native English

speaker. English has simply become the language that facilitates

communication, and for many people learning English is an essential stepping

stone on the road to success.

同样重要的是，全球交流的革命跟英语的普及是不可分割的。 英语现在变成领先的国际

语言。不管与会者是否是把英语作为母语，全球不管哪个角落的 会议和商业会谈都是使用的

英语。英语已经变成一种促进交流的语言。同时，对很多人来 说，学习英语是他们通往成功

道路上的奠基石。

So why, you may wonder, would anyone have misgivings about all these

wonderful developments, and why does the rise of English as a global

language cause feelings of uneasiness for some of us? For there are indeed

problems with the communications revolution, problems that are not only

economic. Most fundamental is the profound relationship between language

and culture that lies at the heart of society and one that we overlook at our

peril.

所以你可能会好奇为 什么有些人对于这些美好的发展有所顾忌，为什么英语作为一个国际

通用语言会使得有些 人对英语的不适应？交流上的革命确实存在问题，并且这些问题并不仅

仅是经济上的。最 根本的东西是，语言和文化之间的不可分割的关系是一个社会的核心，而

我们忽视了一些 最关键的事情。

Different cultures are not simply groups of people who label the world

differently; languages give us the means to shape our views of the world and

languages are different from one another. We express what we see and feel

through language, and because languages are so clearly culture-related, often

we find that what we can say in one language cannot be expressed at all in

another. The English word

different state of mind, something that is not quite homesickness and involves

a kind of longing. Homesickness and nostalgia put together are almost, but not

quite, the Portuguese

state of mind that is not despair, angst (English borrowed that from German),

sadness or regret, but hovers somewhere in and around all those words.

不同的文化不仅仅是给不同组别的人贴上标签，语言是帮助我们理解世界的工具，每个

< br>语言之间都是有区别的。因为我们通过语言来表达我们的所见所想，而语言是跟文化密切相

关的，所以有时候就可能产生我们能用一种语言表达出来的东西，是不能用另外一种语言来

表达出来的。英语的

“

想家

”

翻译成意大利语就变成了

“

怀乡病

”

，但是英语有时候必须要用同

样的词来表示另外一种意思，

这种意思不是单纯的想家，

而是包含了一层渴望的意思在里面。

尽管不是同一种意思，英语的想家和怀乡病 放在一起的意思还有所接近的。但是葡萄牙语的

“sauda de”

所表达的意思却是不能用其他语言来翻译的。

这个词表达 的意思是不绝望，

不愤怒，

不悲伤或者后悔，它的意思是在以上 这些意思之间。

The early Bible translators hit the problem of untranslatability head-on.

How do you translate the image of the Lamb of God for a culture in which

sheep do not exist? What exactly was the fruit that Eve picked in the Garden

of Eden? What was the creature that swallowed Jonah, given that whales are

not given to swimming in warm, southern seas? Faced with unsurmountable

linguistic problems, translators negotiated the boundaries between languages

and came up with a compromise.

早期的圣经翻译者就碰到了有些意思是不可翻译的这么个问题 。比如你要如何把上帝的

羔羊的形象翻译给一个连羊都不存在的人类文明？爱娃从伊甸园 拿走的水果具体是什么？如

果鲸鱼在温暖的南部海域是不存在的，那么吞掉约拿的生物又 是什么？面对这些不能克服的

语言问题，翻译家在各语言之间反复琢磨，然后想出了一个 折中的方案。

Compromising is something that speakers of more than one language

understand. When there are no words in another language for what you want

to say, you make adjustments and try to approximate. English and Welsh

speakers make adjustments regarding the colour spectrum in the

grey/green/blue/brown range, since English has four words and Welsh has

three. And even where words do exist, compromises still need to be made.

The word

and even a word like

means totally different things to different people. The flat breads of Central

Asia are a long way away from Mother's Pride white sliced toasties, yet the

word

这个折中的方案是用不同 种语言交流的人们都能理解的说法。当你想表达的单词在另外

一种语言里不存在的时候， 你要想办法来调整接近原来单词的意思。说英语的和讲威尔士语

的在灰，绿，蓝，棕表达 光谱的单词上进行了一些调整。因为英语能表达出这

4

个单词而 威

尔士语只能表达出其中的三个。尽管各语言之间意思相同的单词确实存在，有时候仍然 要使

用折中的方案。民主这个词在不同的背景下表达出来的意思是完全不一样的，连像面 包这种

词汇对不同人的意思都是完全不同的，面包指的是那些主要原材料是面粉的食品。 中亚的扁

面包和

“

母亲骄傲

< p>
”

的烤面包是完全不一样的食品，面包这个单词却要同时包含这两种食物。

Inevitably, the spread of English means that millions of people are

adding another language to their own and are learning how to negotiate

cultural and linguistic differences. This is an essential skill in today's hybrid

world, particularly now when the need for international understanding has

rarely been so important. But even as more people become multilingual, so

native English speakers are losing out, for they are becoming ever more

monolingual, and hence increasingly unaware of the differences between

cultures that languages reveal. Communicating in another language involves

not only linguistic skills, but the ability to think differently, to enter into another

culture's mentality and shape language accordingly. Millions of people are

discovering how to bridge cultures, while the English-speaking world becomes

ever more complacent and cuts down on foreign language learning

programmes in the mistaken belief that it is enough to know English.

不可避免的，

英 语的广泛传播意味着成百上万的人们需要学习另外一种语言，

并且要学

< br>会如何识别文化的区别和语言上的区别。这项技能在现在的混合社会里尤其重要，尤其是在

这个国际之间的理解如此重要的时代。当越来越多的人们掌握了多种语言，以英语为母语的

人却正在失去优势，因为他们已经变成只会一种语言的人，所以他们不可能知道文化所产生

< p>
的语言上的差别。用另外一种语言来交流不仅仅是使用语言技能，也包括要能使用另外一种

文化的思维方式，

来组织自己的语言。

当成百上 万的人正在探索如何缩小文化之间的差距时，

以英语为母语的社会却变的越来越自满，并 且开始删减外语课，因为他们相信会说英语就足

够了。

World peace in the future depends on intercultural understanding. Those

best

placed

to

help

that

process

may

not

be

the

ones

with

the

latest

technology

and

state

of

the

art

mobile

phones,

but

those

with

the

skills

to

understand what lies in, under and beyond the words spoken in many different

languages.

在将来，世界和平需要各文化之间的互相理解。那些最能促进 这种互相理解的人可能并

不是那些掌握最新技术，和最新科技水平的手机的人。相反，这 些人一定是那些具有理解不

同语言所表达的意思的人。

They say a cat has nine lives, and I am inclined to think that possible since

I am

now living my third life and I’m not even a cat. My first life began on a

clear, cold day in November 1904, when I arrived as the sixth of eight children

of

a

farming

family.

My

father

died

when

I

was

１５

,

and

we

had

a

hard

struggle to make a living. As the children grew up, they married, leaving only

one sister and myself to support and care for Mother, who became paralyzed

in her last years and died while still in her 60s. My sister married soon after,

and I followed her example within the year.

人们说猫有

< p>
9

条命

,

我倾向于认为这是可能的

,

因为我现在活的是第三次生命

,

而我 不是

猫。

1904

年

< br>11

月的一个晴朗、寒冷的日子

,

我开始了我的第一次生命。我成了一个务农家

庭

8

个孩子中的第

6

个。

我

15

岁时父亲去世

,

我们全家都得为生计艰辛奔忙。

孩子们长大后

,

一个个结婚出嫁

,

只剩下我和一个姐姐抚养和照顾妈妈。她晚年时瘫痪

,

60

多岁就去世了。

我姐姐不久就嫁了人

,

我也在当年结了婚。

This was when I began to enjoy my first life. I was very happy, in excellent

health,

and

quite

a

good

athlete.

My

wife

and I became

the parents

of

two

lovely

girls.

I

had

a

good

job

in

San

Jose

and

a

beautiful

home

up

the

peninsula in San Carlos. Life was a pleasant dream. Then the dream ended. I

became

afflicted

with

a

slowly

progressive

disease

of

the

motor

nerves,

affecting first my right arm and leg, and then my other side. Thus began my

second life. . .

这时我开始享受我的第一次生命。我非常幸福

,

非常健康

,

而且是一名相当出色的运 动

员。我们有两个可爱的女儿。我在圣何塞有份满意的工作

,

在半岛北部的圣卡洛斯有幢漂亮

的房子。

生活是称心如意的梦想。

好景不长

,

美梦中断了。

我得了缓慢发展的运动神经病

,

先

是我的右臂和右腿活动受阻

,

而后是左侧。我的第二次生命就此开始??

In spite of my disease I still drove to and from work each day, with the aid

of special equipment installed in my car. And I managed to keep my health

and optimism, to a degree, because of 14 steps.