北大翻译硕士练习题.docVIP

英汉笔译实践II , MTI, Department of English, University of Peking September 10th, 2011 请将下文译成汉语： The Enormity of Wicked Words Our most valuable currency is being devalued through neglect and abuse. — Rod Usher Someone struck by an event will often say, “Words fail me.” Shock, disbelief or anger leaves them unable to synchronize heart, brain and mouth. After a bit of huffing and puffing, words begin to splutter out again as fast and disorganized as water over rocks, which is the way most conversation tumbles along. But what happens when we fail words? That can be more serious. There are warning signs of this betrayal. One is the grafting of fancy new fruit onto old wordstock. Novelist Kingsley Amis pronounced 20 years ago: “If there’s one word that sums up everything that’s gone wrong since the War, it’s workshop.” Amis, ever waspish, presumably was fuming about the corruption of a place of craft into a synonym for group babbling, or into a vacuous verb, as in, “Say, Arthur, how about we do breakfast and workshop that scenario?” Another indicator of cracks in the building blocks of meaning is elongation, such as the cancerous spread – its cells multiplying more than sixfold – of “war” to “military intervention”. Once the disease takes hold, sense can double back upon itself. In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, suddenly “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” Sometimes we fail words because we let a specific sense mist into another. For example, disinterested, meaning unbiased, has been gobbled up by uninterested. A person in court wants the judge to be one but not the other. And if your lawyer is discomfited, he may not be made uncomfortable but overwhelmingly defeated, or routed. In which case, any praise he may get from you will be fulsome, not copious but insincere. Where is the enormity in all – this enormity meaning wickedness, not hugeness? An old wordsmith I knew, the late Stephen Murray-Smith, wrote that while it’s stuffy to resist blind