广外考研2009翻译写作.docVIP

Part I writing (100 points) 1. Summary writing (40points) Directions: Read carefully the following passage and summarize its contents in 15--200 words. You must not copy complete sentences directly from the passage, which will incur deduction of your scores. ??Language is more than just a means of communication. It influences our culture and even our thought processes. During the first four decades of the 20thcentury, language was viewed by American linguists and anthropologists as being more important than it actually is in shaping our perception of reality. This was mostly due to Edward SAPI and his student Benjamin Whorf who said that language predetermines what we see in the world around us. In other words, language acts like a polarizing lens on a camera in filtering reality—we see the real world only in the categories of our language. ??Cross cultural comparisons of such things as color terms were used by SAPI and Whorf as evidence of this hypothesis. When we perceive color with our eyes, we are sensing that portion of electromagnetic radiation that is visible light. Infect, the spectrum of visible light is a continuum of light waves with frequencies that increase at a continuous rate from one end to the other. Another words, there are no distinct colors like red and green in nature. Our culture, through language, guides us in seeing the spectrum in terms of the arbitrarily established categories that we call colors. Different cultures may divide up the spectrum in different ways. This can be seen in the comparison of some English language colors with their counterparts in the Tiv language of Nigeria: ?? English?? ?? Tiv ?? Green ?? ii(high value) ?? ?? Pupu (low value) ?? Blue ?? ?? Gray ?? ?? Brown ?? ?? Nyian?? ?? Red ?? ?? Yellow ?? （表格第二列第二行，请加一右斜线，把ii(high value)和Pupu (low value)分隔开。） ?? Note: value??refers to the lightness or darkness of a color. High value is light and low??value is dark. ?? ??SAPI and Whorf interp