翻译实习作业

《英语笔译实习》

题目：《Learning for Tomorrow》《中国教育事业的发展》

姓名：张恒

年级：2011级

专业：对外汉语专业

学号：201119116

时间：２０１２年6月16－22日

Passage1 英译汉

Learning for Tomorrow

All education springs from some image of the future. If the image of the future held by a society is grossly inaccurate, its education system will betray its youth.

Imagine an Indian tribe which for centuries has sailed dugouts on the river at its doorstep. During all this time, the economy and culture of the tribe have depended upon fishing, preparing and cooking the products of the river, growing food in soil fertilized by the river, building boats ad appropriate tools. So long as the rate of technological change in such a community stay slow, so long as no wars, invasions, epidemics or other natural disasters upset the even rhythm of life, it is simple for the tribe to formulate a workable image of its own future, since tomorrow merely repeats yesterday.

It is from this image that education flows. Schools may not even exist in the tribe; yet there is a curriculum- a cluster of skills, values and rituals to be learned. Boys are taught to scrape bark and hollow out trees, just as their ancestors did before them. The teacher in such a system knows what he is doing, secure in the knowledge that tradition—the past—will work in the future.

What happens to such a tribe, however, when it pursues its traditional methods unaware that five hundred miles upstream men are constructing a gigantic dam that will dry up their branch of the river? Suddenly, the tribe’s image of the future, the set of assumptions on which its members base their present behavior, becomes dangerously misleading. Tomorrow will not replicate today. The tribal investment in preparing its children to live in a river culture becomes a pointless and potentially tragic waste. A false image of the future destroys the relevance of the education effort.

This is our situation today—only it is we, ironically, not some distant strangers—who are building the dam that will annihilate the culture of the present. Never before has any culture subjected itself to so intense and prolonged a bombardment of technological, social and info-psychological change. This change is accelerating and we witness everywhere in the high- technology societies evidence that the old industrial-era structures can no longer carry out their functions.

译文

为未来而学习

所有的教育都来源于对未来的一些想象，倘若对未来的评估不准，则教育体制把青年引入歧途！

想象一下有一个印第安纳部落几个世纪以来都在自己家门的河流上用独木舟航行，在这些时间里,部落的经济和文化依靠渔业而发展起来，他们准备和烹饪河流带给他们的事物，在土地肥沃的河边种植食物，制造船只和合适的工具。因为在这样一个部落里科技变革速度那么慢，所以只要没有战争，侵略，传染病或其他自然灾害扰乱他们生活的节奏，我们就很容易勾画切合现实的未来，因为他们的明天只是重复着昨天而已。

如果教育的流程也是按图索骥。学校甚至可能不存在于这种部落之中，而要学习的是一连串的知识、价值观和仪式。男孩被教导去刮树皮和挖空树，就像他们祖先之前做的那样。在这样的系统中教师非常清楚自己在做什么,确切知道传统的“填鸭式教育”在未来起的决定性作用。

突然间，还在陶醉于此，人们没有意识到，千年赖以生存的河流上游咫尺之遥，代表变革的先知者居然建起了一道大坝，抽干支流，现存的文明面临干涸的危机。他们霍然发现他们未来部落的远景在一系列的假设之后，他们根据他们部落现在的状态，将会得到一种危险性的误导。明天将不会重复今天。部落在为他的孩子们生活在河流文化部落所做的投资准备变成了毫无意义和潜在的悲剧性浪费，教育的努力因此而付之东流。

这就是我们今天面临的处境，但不仅是我们单独面临的，讽刺的是，不远处建造水坝的陌生人将消灭我们现在的文化。人类文明从未受过