历年英语专业八级翻译题

8级测试英译汉部分；——1996—2005年英语专业8级统考题中英译汉试题评析【1996年8级测试英译汉】Four months before Election Day1, five men gathered in a small conference room at the Reagan-Bush headquarters2and reviewed an oversize calendar that marked the remaining days of the 1984 presidenti al campaign. It was the last Saturday in June and at ten o’clock in the morning the rest of the office was practically deserted3. Even so, the men kept the door shut and the drapes carefully drawn. The three principals and their two deputies had come from around the country for a critical meeting4. Their aim was to devise a strategy5that would guarantee Ronald Reagan’s resounding reelection to a second term in the White House.It should have been easy. They were battle-tested veterans6 with long ties to Reagan and even longer ties to the Republican Party, men who understood presidential politics7 as well as any in the country. The backdrop8 of the campaign was hospitable, with lots of good news to work with: America was at peace, and the nation’s economy, a key factor in any election, was rebounding vigorously after recession. Furthermore, the campaign itself was lavishly financed9, with plenty of money for a top-flight staff10, travel, and television commercials. And, most important, their candidate was Ronald Reagan, a president of tremendous personal popularity and dazzling communication skills11. Reagan has succeeded more than any president since John F. Kennedy in projecting a broad vision of America—a nation of renewed military strength, individual initiative, and smaller federal government12.【1997年8级测试英译汉】Opera is expensive: that much is inevitable.1 But expensive things are not inevitably the province of the rich unless we abdicate society’s power of choice. 2 We can choose to make opera, and other expensive forms of culture, accessible to those who cannot individually pay for it. 3The question is: why should we? Nobody denies the imperatives of food, shelter, defense, health and education. 4 But even in a prehistoric cave, mankind stretched out a hand not just to eat, drink or fight, but also to draw. 5 The impulse towards culture, the desire to express and explore the world through imagination and representation is fundamental. 6 In Europe, this desire has found fulfillment in the masterpieces of our music, art, literature and theatre. These masterpieces are the touchstones7for all our efforts; they are the touchstones for the possibilities to which human thought and imagination may aspire; they carry the most profound messages that can be sent from one human to another.8【1998年8级测试英译汉】I agree to some extent with my imaginary English reader. American literary historians are perhaps prone to view their own national scene too narrowly, mistaking prominence for uniqueness. They do over-phrase1 their own literature, or certainly its minor figures. And Americans do swing from aggressive over-phrase of their literature to an equally unfortunate, imitative deference. 2 But then, the English themselves are somewhat insular in their literary appraisals. 3 Moreover, in fields where they are not pre-eminent—e. g. in painting and music—they too alternate between boasting of native products and copying those of the Continent. How many English paintings try to look as though they were done in Paris; how many times have we read in articles that they really represent an “English tradition” after all.To speak of American literature, then, is not to assert that it is completely unlike that of Europe. Broadly speaking, America and Europe have kept step4. At any given moment5the traveler could find examples in both of the same architecture, the same styles in dress, the same books on theshelves. Ideas have crossed the Atlantic as freely as men and merchandise, though sometimes more slowly. When I refer to American habit, thoughts, etc., I intend some sort of qualification to precede the word, for frequently the difference between America and Europe (especially England) will be one of degree, sometimes only of a small degree. The amount of divergence is a subtle affair, liable to perplex6 the Englishman when he looks at America. He is looking at a country which in important senses grew out of his own, which in several ways still resembles his own — and which is yet a foreign country.7There are odd overlappings and abrupt unfamiliarities; kinship yields to a sudden alienation, as when we hail a person across the street, only to discover from his blank response that we have mistaken a stranger for a friend. 8【1999年8级测试英译汉】In some societies people want children for what might be called familial reasons1: to extend the family line or the fa mily name2, to propitiate the ancestors; to enable the proper functioning of religious rituals involving the family3. Such reasons may seem thin in the modern, secularized society but they have been and are powerful indeed in other places.In addition, one class of family reasons shares a border with the following category4, namely, having children in order to maintain or improve a marriage: to hold the husband or occupy the wife5, to repair or rejuvenate the marriage; to increase the number of children on the assumption that family happiness lies that way6. The point is underlined by its converse7: in some societies the failure to bear children (or males) is a threat to the marriage and a ready cause for divorce. 8 Beyond all that is the profound significance of children to the very institution of the family itself.9 To many people, husband and wife alone do not seem a proper family—they need children to enrich the circle, to validate its family character, to gather the redemptive influence10 of offspring. Children need the family, but the family seems also to need children, as the social institution uniquely available, at least in principle, for security, comfort, assurance, and direction in a changing, often hostile, world. To most people, such a home base, in the literal sense, needs more than one person for sustenance and in generational extension.【2000年8级测试英译汉】If people me an anything at all by the expression “untimely death”1, they must believe that some deaths run on a better schedule than others2. Death in old age is rarely called untimely—a long life is thought to be a full one3. But with the passing of a young person, one assumes that the best years lay ahead4 and the measure of that life was still to be taken. 5 History denies this, of course. Among prominent summer deaths6, one recalls those of MariLyn Monroe and James Deans, whose lives seemed equally brief and complete. 7 Writers cannot bear the fact that poet John Keats died at 26, and only half playfully judge their own lives as failures when they pass that year.8 The idea that the life cut short is unfulfilled is illogical because lives are measured by the impressions they leave on the world and by their intensity and virtue. 9【2001年8级测试英译汉】Possession for its own sake or in competition with the rest of the neighborhood would have been Thoreau’s idea of the low levels1. The active discipline of heightening one’s perception of what is enduring in nature would have been his idea of the high2. What he saved from the low was time and effort he could spend on the high. Thoreau certainly disapproved of starvation, but he would put into feeding himself only as much effort as would keep him functioning for more important efforts.Effort is the gist of it3. There is no happiness except as we take on life-engaging difficulties. Short of the impossible, as Yeats put it, the satisfaction we get from a lifetime depends on howhigh we choose our difficulties4. Robert Frost was thinking in something like the same terms when he spoke of “The pleasure of taking pains”5. The mortal flaw in the advertised version of happiness is in the fact that it purports to be effortless6.We demand difficulty even in our games. We demand it because without difficulty there can be no game. A game is a way of making something hard of the fun of it. The rules of the game are an arbitrary imposition of difficulty7. When someone ruins the fun, he always does so by refusing to play by the rules. It is easier to win at chess if you are free, at your pleasure, to change the wholly arbitrary rules, but the fun is in winning within the rules. No difficulty, no fun. 【2002年8级测试英译汉】The word “winner” and “loser” have many meanings1. When we refer to a person as a winner, we do not mean one who makes someone else lose. To us, a winner is one who responds authentically by being credible, trustworthy, responsive, and genuine, both as an individual and as a member of a society2.Winners do not dedicate their lives to a concept of what they imagine they should be; rather, they are themselves and as such do not use their energy putting on a performance, maintaining pretence, and manipulating others3. They are aware that there is a difference between being loving and acting loving, between being stupid and acting stupid, between being knowledgeable and acting knowledgeable4. Winners do not need to hide behind a mask.Winners are not afraid to do their own thinking and to use their own knowledge5. They can separate facts from opinions and don’t pretend to have all the answers6. They listen to others, evaluate what they say, but come to their own conclusions. Although winners can admire and respect other people, they are not totally defined, demolished, bound, or awed by them7.Winners do not play“helpless”, nor do they play the blaming game8. Instead, they assume responsibility for their own lives.【2003年8级测试英译汉】In his classic novel,“The Pioneers”, James Fenimore Cooper has his hero, a land developer, take his cousin on a tour of the city he is building1. He describes the broad streets, rows of houses, a teeming metropolis2. But his cousin looks around bewildered3. All she ses is a forest.“Where are the beauties and improvements which you were to show me?”She asks4. He’s astonished she can’t see them..“Where! Why everywhere,”he replies5. For though they are not yet built on earth, he has built them in his mind, and they are as concrete to him as if they were already constructed and finished.Cooper was illustrating6 a distinctly American trait, future-mindedness7; the ability to see the present from the vantage point of the future; the freedom to feel unencumbered by the past and more emotionally attached to things to come8. As Albert Einstein once said, “Life for the American is always becoming, never being. ”9【2004年8级测试英译汉】For me the most inte resting thing about a solitary life, and mine has been that for the last twenty years, is that it becomes increasingly rewarding1. When I can wake up and watch the sun rise over the ocean, as I do most days, and know that I have an entire day ahead, uninterrupted, in which to write a few pages2, take a walk with my dog, read and listen to music, I am flooded with happiness3.I am lonely only when I am overtired, when I have worked too long without a break, when for the time being I feel empty and need filling up4. And I am lonely sometimes when I come back home after a lecture trip, when I have seen a lot of people and talked a lot, and am full to the brimwith experience that needs to be sorted out5.Then for a little while the house feels huge and empty, and I wonder where my self is hiding. It has to be recaptured slowly by watering the plants and, perhaps, by looking again at each one as though it were a person6.It takes a while, as I watch the surf blowing up in fountains7, but the moment comes when the world falls away, and the self emerges again from the deep unconsciousness, bring back all I have recently experienced to be explored and slowly understood8.【2005年8级测试英译汉】It is simple enough to say that since books have classes — fiction, biography, poetry — we should separate them and take from each what it is right that each should give us1.Yet few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices2. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning. Do not dictate to your author: try to become him. Be his fellow-worker and accomplice3. If you hang back, and reserve and criticize at first, you are preventing yourself from getting the fullest possible value from what you read4. But if you open your mind as widely as possible5, then signs and hints of almost imperceptible fineness, from the twist and turn of the first sentences, will bring you into the presence of a human being unlike any other. Steep yourself in this, acquaint yourself with this6, and soon you will find that your author is giving you, or attempting to give you, something far more definite.汉译英部分——1998—2003年英语专业8级统考题中汉译英试题评析【1998年8级测试汉译英】1997年2月24日我们代表团下榻日月潭中信大饭店，送走了最后一批客人，已是次日凌晨3点了。