2012年研究生入学考试英语（一）翻译部分参考译文

    2012年研究生入学考试英语一的翻译文章出自美国杂志《Nature》，题目是Universal truths。这篇文章的理论性比较强，对于大家来说应该会感觉很有难度，大家首先要理解文章大意，依据专业性来定词义。

文章原文如下，选入2012考研英语一翻译真题时有部分删改：

  Since at least the days of Aristotle, a search for universal principles has characterized the scientific enterprise. In some ways, this quest for commonalities defines science: without it, there is no underlying order and pattern, merely as many explanations as there are things in the world.   Newton's laws of motion, the oxygen theory of combustion and Darwinian evolution each bind a host of different phenomena into a single explicatory framework.

46. In physics, one approach takes this impulse for unification to its extreme, and seeks a theory of everything — a single generative equation for all we see. It is becoming less clear, however, that such a theory would be a simplification, given the proliferation of dimensions and universes that it might entail. Nonetheless, unification of sorts remains a major goal.

46. 在物理学上，一种方法就是把这种寻求统一性的冲动发挥到了极端，并努力寻找一种万能的理论，即一条唯一的为我们都看到的一切所生成的公式。

  This tendency in the natural sciences has long been evident in the social sciences too. 47. Here, Darwinism seems to offer justification, for if all humans share common origins, it seems reasonable to suppose that cultural diversity could also be traced to more constrained beginnings.

  47. 在这里，达尔文之说似乎提供了一个理由，因为如果所有的人类都有共同的起源，那么文化多样性也能够追溯到更为有限的起源，这似乎是有道理的。

  Just as the bewildering variety of human courtship rituals might all be considered to be forms of sexual selection, perhaps the world's languages, music, social and religious customs and even history are governed by universal features. 48. To filter out what is unique from what is shared might enable us to understand how complex cultural behavior arose and what guides it in evolutionary or cognitive terms.

  48. 从共性中过滤出独特性能够使我们理解复杂的文化行为是怎样出现的，以及用进化或认知的概念来说，是什么在引导这种文化行为。

  That, at least, is the hope. But a comparative study of linguistic traits published online today (M. Dunn et al. Nature doi:10.1038/nature09923; 2011) supplies a reality check. Russell Gray at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and his colleagues consider the evolution of grammars in the light of two previous attempts to find universality in language.

  The most famous of these efforts was initiated by Noam Chomsky, who postulated that humans are born with an innate language-acquisition capacity — a brain module or modules specialized for language — that dictates a universal grammar. A few generative rules are then sufficient to unfold the entire fundamental structure of a language, which is why children can learn it so quickly. Languages would diversify through changes to the 'parameter settings' of the generative rules.

  49.The second, by Joshua Greenberg, takes a more empirical approach to universality, identifying traits (particularly in word order) shared by many languages, which are considered to represent biases that result from cognitive constraints. Chomsky's and Greenberg's are not the only theories on the table for how languages evolve, but they make the strongest predictions about universals.

49．第二种努力，就是由约书亚格林伯做出的，就是采取一个更为经验主义的普遍性方法，来识别许多语言所共有的特征(特别是词序方面)，这些特征认为是代表了由认知限制所引起的倾向。

Gray and his colleagues have put them to the test by examining four family trees that between them represent more than 2,000 languages. 50. Chomsky's grammar should show patterns of language change that are independent of the family tree or the pathway tracked through it, whereas Greenberg Ian universality predicts strong co-dependencies between particular types of word-order relations. Neither of these patterns is borne out by the analysis, suggesting that the structures of the languages are lineage-specific and not governed by universals.

50.乔姆斯基的语法应该显示出语言变化的模式，这些模式并不受语言谱系或贯穿谱系路径的影响，而格林堡式的普遍性则预言了特定的语法次序关系类型之间所存在的紧密相互关系。

  This does not mean that cognitive constraints are irrelevant, or that there are no other universals dictated by communication efficiency. It is surely inevitable that cognition sets limits on, say, word length. But such 'universals' seem likely to be relatively trivial features of languages, just as may be the case for putative universals in music and other aspects of culture.

  The conclusion? We should perhaps learn the lesson of Darwinism: a 'universal' mechanism of adaptation says little in itself about how a particular feature got to be the way it is, or about how it works. This truth has dawned on physicists too: universal equations are all very well, but the world actually consists of particular solutions, and these are generally the result of contingent history. One size does not always fit all.