研究生英语3考翻译片段.docVIP

Many new words have been added to the English language in the past forty years; and since Shakespeare’s time the number of words in the language has increased more than five times, from about 140,000 to somewhere between 700,000 and 800,000. Most of these new words have not come from borrowing, but from the natural growth of the language. 在过去的四十年中，英语加入了许多新单词，自从莎士比亚时代起，语言中的单词量增加了超过五倍，从十四万增长至七八十万。这些新单词中的绝大多数并非借鉴其他语言，而是来自于语言的自然发展。The language has always changed, but the rate of change has been uneven; minor changes have slowly accumulated in every generation, but there have been periods of rapid changes as well. The most important of these periods occurred during the two hundred and fifty years after 1066, the year the Normans conquered England. Before the conquest, the inhabitants of England spoke Anglo-Saxon, a complex Germanic language. The Normans were Norsemen who, after generations of raiding, had settled in northern France in the tenth century and by 1066 were speaking a form of French. After their conquest of England they instituted Norman French as the dominant language-the language of the upper class, of law, of government, and of such commerce as there was. 语言总是在变化中，但是变化率却不稳定。每代都缓慢积累少量的变化，但也有变化较快的时期。最重要的时期出现在1066年以后的250年间的诺曼人占领英格兰的时候。在占领以前，英格兰的居民讲的是盎格鲁-撒克逊语，一种复杂的德语。诺曼人是经过世代的劫掠，于10世纪定居于法国北部的古挪威人，并且至1066年讲一种形式的法语。在他们占领英格兰以后，制定了诺曼法语作为统治语言，一种上层阶级、法律、政府以及类似于商业之类的语言。2、The divergence, in ethnic(种族的) and physical background as well as history, among the four countries which eventually became the United Kingdom are still reflected in the characteristic which distinguish the English, Scots, Welsh, and Northern Irish from one another. In general, however, the similarities are now more numerous than the differences and serve to give the people a character definitely identifiable as British. 在最终成为大不列颠联合王国的四个地区中，种族、自然背景及历史方面的差异反映在特征上，这些特征将英格兰人、苏格兰人、威尔士人和北爱尔兰人区别开来。总的来说，现在相同点要多于不同点，并且给人们提供作为英国人所特有的特征。 English people tend to be hostile, or at least bored, when they hear