加载中…2008年联合国LCE笔译考试第一部分及我的译文
(2014-01-20 22:49:48)
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人最突出的特点之一，就是人与人之间在许多方面差异悬殊。人的身体大小和形态千差万别，思维、语言和情感模式上的差异也令人惊讶。同样令人惊讶的是，即便对于食色钱权这样基本的事物，各人的反应也完全不同。在天才和庸人之间，在才能或性情生来不同的人之间，有一条巨大的鸿沟，需要极度的开明和宽宏大量才能跨越。
These are facts which from time memorial have been recognized, described in plays and stories ,commented on in proverbs, aphorisms, and poems. And yet, in spite of their obviousness and their enormous practical importance, these facts are still, to a very great extent, outside the pale of systematic thought.
从古至今，人们便认识到这种情况，在戏剧和小说里加以描写，用谚语、格言、诗歌予以评述。然而，尽管这种情况显而易见，也具有极大的实际意义，却很少有人对之作系统的思考。
The first and indispensible condition of systematic thought is classification. For the purposes of pure and applied science, the best classification is comprehensive, covering as many of the indefinitely numerous facts as it is possible for thought to cover without becoming confused, and yet is simple enough to be readily understood and used without being so simple as to be untrue to the essentially complex nature of reality. The categories under which it classifies things and events are easily recognizable, lend themselves to being expressed in quantitative terms, and can be shown experimentally to be meaningful for our specifically human purposes.
Up to the present, all the systems in terms of which men have attempted to think human differences have been unsatisfactory. Some for example, have conspicuously failed to cover more than a part of the relevant facts. This is especially true of psychology and sociology as commonly taught and practised at the present time. How many of even the best of our psychologists talk, write, think, and act as though the human body, with its innate constitution and its acquired habits, were something that, in an analysis of mental states, could safely be ignored! And even when they do admit, rather reluctantly, that the mind always trails its carcass behind it, they have little or nothing to tell us about the ways in which mental and physical characteristics are related.
Sociologists deal with abstractions even more phantasmally bodiless. For example, they will carry out laborious researches into the problems of marriage. But when we read the results, we are flabbergasted to find that the one factor never taken into account by the researchers is who the men and women under investigation actually are. We are told every detail about their social and economic background; nothing at all about their inherited psycho-physical constitution.
而社会学家的抽象研究，就更加虚无缥缈了。譬如，他们会大费周章地研究婚姻问题。然而，我们看到他们的研究结果时，会惊诧莫名地发现，有一个因素是这些研究者从来不曾考虑过的，那就是他们所研究的那些男男女女究竟是谁。社会学家巨细靡遗地告诉我们，这些人的社会背景如何，经济状况如何；至于他们承继先辈的心理和生理结构，却只字不提。
There are other classificatory systems which claim to be comprehensive, but in which the indispensable process of simplification has been carried so far that they are no longer true to the facts. The interpretation of all human activity in terms of economics is a case in point. Another type of oversimplification is to be found in theories which profess to account for everything that men do or are in terms of environment, education, or conditioned reflexes, who attribute all the observable differences between human beings to hereditary factors, and refuse to admit that environmental influences may also play a part.
还有一些分类体系，虽号称全面，但少不了简化的过程，而且简化过度，已经无法反映现实。一个典型的例子，就是用经济学的观点解释所有的人类活动。还有一种过度简化，就是有些理论自称能解释人所做的一切，其方法就是统统将其归结为环境问题，教育问题，或者条件反射，而拒不承认环境影响可能也会发生作用。
It may be remarked in passing that most of the hypotheses and classification systems we use in our everyday thinking are grossly oversimplified and therefore grossly untrue to a reality which is intrinsically complex. Popular theories about such things as morals, politics, economics and religion are generally of the either-or, A-causes-B variety. But in any real-life situation there are almost always more than two valid and workable alternatives and invariably more than one determining cause. That is why the utterances of speech-making politicians can never, in the very nature of things, be true. In half an hour’s yelling from a platform it is intellectually impossible for even the most scrupulous man to tell the delicately complex truth about any of the major issues of political or economic life.
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