2017年中級(jí)筆譯課后練習(xí)題（3）

　　Exercise 5

　　Reading is a pleasure of the mind, which means that it is a little like a sport: your eagerness and knowledge and quickness make you a good reader. Reading is fun, not because the writer is telling you something, but because it makes your mind work. Your own imagination works along with the author's or even goes beyond his. Your experience, compared with his, brings you to the same or different conclusions, and your ideas develop as you understand his.

　　讀書愉悅心靈，這幾有點(diǎn)兒像運(yùn)動(dòng)。一個(gè)優(yōu)秀的讀者必須要有熱情、知識(shí)、速度。讀書之樂不在于，作者在告訴你什么，而在于它促使你思考。你跟隨作者一起想象，有時(shí)你的想象甚至超越作者。你的經(jīng)驗(yàn)加上他的經(jīng)驗(yàn)，可以得到相同或者不同的結(jié)論。在理解作者想法的同時(shí)，也形成了自己的觀點(diǎn)。

　　Every book stands by itself, like a one-family house, but books in a library are like houses in a city. Although they are separate, together they all add up to something; they are connected with each other and with other cities. The same ideas, or related ones, turn up in different places; the human problems that repeat themselves in life repeat themselves in literature, but with different solutions according to different writings at different times.　每本書都隔成體系，就像一家一戶的住宅。而圖書館的藏書就像是城市里千家萬戶的居所。盡管他們相互獨(dú)立，但相互結(jié)合才有意義。家家戶戶彼此相連，城市與城市彼此相依。相同或相似的思想在不同的地方涌現(xiàn)。人類生活中反復(fù)出現(xiàn)的問題在文學(xué)中也會(huì)不算重現(xiàn)。但因時(shí)代與作品的差異，答案也各不相同。

　　Reading can only be fun if you expect it to be. If you concentrate on books somebody tells you "ought" to read, you probably won't have fun. But if you put down a book you don't like and try another till you find one that means something to you, and then relax with it, you will almost certainly have a good time--and if you become as a result of reading, better, wiser, kinder, or more gentle, you won't have suffered during the process.

　　如果你希望的話，讀書也能充滿樂趣。倘若你只讀別人告訴你應(yīng)該讀的書，那么就不會(huì)感覺有樂趣而言。但是如果你放下不喜歡的，嘗試閱讀另外的，直到找到中意的為止，然后輕輕松松的讀下去，那一定會(huì)收獲一段美好時(shí)光——而且如果你因?yàn)樽x書而變得更優(yōu)秀，更睿智，更友善，更文雅時(shí)，你就不會(huì)覺得閱讀是一種折磨。

　　Exercise 6

　　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 religious 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.

　　在一些社會(huì)，人們因?yàn)樗�謂的一些家庭原因而想要擁有孩子：傳宗接代，光宗耀祖，討好祖輩;使得有關(guān)家庭的宗教禮儀得以正常傳承。這些原因在現(xiàn)代世俗化社會(huì)，似顯蒼白，而在其他地區(qū)，它卻曾一度構(gòu)成并確實(shí)仍在構(gòu)成強(qiáng)有力的原因

　　In addition, one class of family reasons shares a border with the following category, namely, having children in order to maintain or improve a marriage: 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 marriage and a ready cause for divorce.

　　.此外，還有一個(gè)家庭原因與下列范疇不無共通之處。這便是，生兒育女可以維系，改善婚姻;可以拴住丈夫或者使妻子不再無所事事;修復(fù)或者是重振婚姻;多子多孫，以為家庭幸福唯有此法。而這一點(diǎn)由其反面得以彰顯：在某些社會(huì)，無法生兒育女(或者是、無法生育兒子)對(duì)于婚姻而言，是一個(gè)隱患，還可以作為離婚的現(xiàn)成借口。

　　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 redemptive 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 people, such a home base, in the literal sense, needs more than one person for sustenance and in generational extension后代對(duì)于家庭這一體制本身的意義遠(yuǎn)非如此。對(duì)于大多數(shù)人來說，只有夫婦二人并不是真正意義上的一個(gè)家庭——他們需要孩子去豐富這個(gè)二人世界，賦予這二人世界。真正意義上的家庭性質(zhì)，并從后代子孫那里獲得某種回報(bào)。孩子需要家，而家庭似乎也需要孩子。家庭作為一個(gè)獨(dú)一無二的社會(huì)機(jī)構(gòu)，至少在原則上，能在這樣一個(gè)變化多端、到處都是敵對(duì)的世界能給予我們一定的安全感，慰藉。保證以及價(jià)值取向上。于大多數(shù)人而言，就字面意義上來說，也不需要一個(gè)人來維系并存在，并使其代代生息。