1、1北 京 林 业 大 学2004 年硕士研究生入学考试 翻译和写作 试题I. Translate the following passage into Chinese. (50 points) We think of retirement as something for those who, having put in years of service, yearn for a pasture with holes and flags in it. But after five or ten years near the beginning of things, when every cha
2、llenge seemed terrifying and every situation filled with opportunity for advancement, I have felt one thing very strongly: Work is for the very young and the very old. Retirement should be reserved for those who can enjoy itthose old enough to have achieved some wisdom and perspective but young enou
3、gh to feel the blood in their veins and possibly somebody elses too.Its a simple idea, easy to execute. After a minimum tenure of employmentsay, ten to 12 years, the worker, in the full flush of adult vigor and capacity, would be required to take a retirement package that included a decent severance
4、, a guaranteed stipend, and an adequate continuation of health insurance. After a time the lucky individual, having enjoyed years of carefree retirement activities, at the age of 58 or so, would be expected to return to the ranks of the employed and work until unable to do so any longer, at which po
5、int he or she would be expected to get lost.Think of the benefits to every generation! The young and zesty would have a host of jobs at their disposal and no pesky 40- and 50-year-olds blocking their way up the ladder. Those proud, mature folks in the high summer of their years would roam the planet
6、 doing as they wished. Perhaps the most blessed in this plan are those in their 50s, 60s, and 70s, who are now consigned to the rag bin of demography just when they want to work most. In my plan this group reenters the workforce with amazing energy, a lifetime of experience, and a full understanding
7、 of how boring life without work can be. What a boon to any office this industrious, sociable group would be, laboring harder and eating and drinking lighter than their younger counterparts, and willing to kiss the feet of any organization giving them something meaningful to do! Anyone who has spent
8、 an afternoon at a retirement village knows what I mean.II. Translate the following passage into English. (50 points)传统的书信方式从写信、写信封、贴邮票到寄出就像是一个酝酿过程，比发 E MAIL 慢多了，但在这个缓慢的过程中能体会到很多细腻的感受，内心所有的情感都一点一滴地浸透在笔纸间，同时想象着对方收到信时的样子，由于这个过程漫长，伴随而来的心情，或愉快，或惆怅，也就随之延长了许多。而写 EMAIL 往往是匆匆忙忙，有事说事，还都是事务性的事，然后一点鼠标就走了。满屏的四方
9、字一个个排列整齐，怎么看都觉得像施了人工化肥的蔬菜水果，全然没了中国字的内在神韵，没了写字人的性情，甚至没了性别，人2们不是常用“娟秀”来形容女人的字吗？其实我一点儿不排斥电脑，也享受着它的种种方便快捷，但每当我要给最亲近的人写信时还是喜欢用笔，因为我坚信字是有生命的，有情感的，在书写的同时，我生命的一部分也随之带走了，而打字则像是请人代笔，隔着一层什么，就像打电话时尽管你能清楚地听到对方的呼吸，可有些话就是怎么也说不出来，最后还是得借助笔纸，就是这么神奇，形式的不同、工具的不同，影响到内容的不同。III. Writing (50 points)Section AWrite a passage
10、 of 200 words about the most emotionally significant moment in your life.You should supply a title for the passage.Section BRead the following passage carefully, and then write a summary of 100 words. Take care to give a connection of ideas.How Farmers Sowed LanguagesNicholas WadeThe homelands of th
11、e Indo-European languages stretch from Dublin to Delhi. But Hadza, a tongue that is one of a kind, is spoken by just 1,000 people near Lake Eyasi in Tanzania. Why do the worlds languages have so uneven a distribution pattern? Two researchers theorize that much of the answer has to do with events tha
12、t began 10,000 years ago, as crop plants were domesticated. Agriculture has long been invoked to explain the spread of the Indo-European languages. Now, Jared Diamond of UCLA and Peter Bellwood of the Australian National University in Canberra have applied the concept to 15 major language families.
13、Their article appeared in the April 25 issue of Science. The premise is that when humans lived as hunters and gatherers, their populations were small, because wild game and berries can support only so many people. But after an agriculture system was devised, populations expanded, displacing the hunt
14、er-gatherers around them and taking their language with them. On this theory, whatever language happened to be spoken in a region where a crop plant was domesticated expanded along with the farmers who spoke it. Even if the farmers interbred with the hunter-gatherers whose land they took, genes can
15、mix, but languages cannot. So the hunters would in many cases have adopted the farmers language. That is why languages “record these processes of demographic expansion more clearly than the genes,“ Bellwood said. One of the clearest expansions, perhaps because it occurred most recently, can be 3foun
16、d in the 1,436 languages in the Niger-Congo or Bantu family, the worlds largest. About 5,000 years ago, Bantu speakers in western Africa who cultivated the yam started spreading out from their homeland. One group traveled south, the other first east to the Great Lakes and then south. The two migrati
17、ons spread the Bantu languages through a third of the continent, displacing the Khoisan, or click-language speakers, who were hunter-gatherers. The agricultural regions of China made up the homelands of three major families, Diamond and Bellwood wrote. One was Austro-Asiatic, which includes a swath
18、of languages now spoken in Cambodia, southern China, India, Malaya and Thailand. Another was the Tai group, which includes Lao and Thai. A third was the Sino-Tibetan family. In the New World, the farmers who domesticated maize and beans in Mexico expanded northward to the area that became the southw
19、estern United States, spreading the Uto-Aztecan family of languages. And Austronesian, a group of 1,236 languages, is the second largest, after the Niger-Congo. The founder language was spoken by rice growers in southern China who colonized Taiwan before 3000 B.C. and spread through Polynesia, reach
20、ing New Zealand by A.D. 1200. The Science article endorses a bold suggestion for the origin of Japanese. The writers say it is derived from the language of rice farmers who arrived from Korea around 400 B.C. and spread their agriculture northward from a southern island, Kyushu. Modern Japanese is no
21、t at all like Korean. But Korea had three ancient kingdoms, each with its own language. Modern Korean derived from the ancient Sillan. Japanese may have evolved from another ancient Korean language, Koguryo, the article says. Just as China was a powerhouse of new language families in the East, the F
22、ertile Crescent, the arc running through Lebanon and through Iraq, was the source of at least three major language families in the West, the authors say. One was Dravidian, a language family now centered on southern India. A second was the Indo-European family, which includes English, French and Ger
23、man in its Western branch and Iranian and Hindi in its Eastern branches. A third may have been Afro-Asiatic, a family that includes ancient Egyptian and Semitic languages like Arabic and Hebrew. The best-known movements of people are those of conquering armies like the Mongols, who overran much of E
24、urasia. The Mongols, because of their rulers harems, left behind many more genes than conquering armies usually do, but their language vanished from their conquered territories. (The New York Times)Marks will be awarded for content, organization, grammar and appropriacy. Failure to follow the instru
25、ctions will result in a loss of marks.参考答案：4I. 英译汉（ 50 分）一般认为，退休属于这样一些人，他们工作了多年，渴望休闲下来打打高尔夫。但在上了五年还是十年班之后，面临令人畏惧的种种挑战和比比皆是的升迁机会，从那时起我就产生了一种强烈的感觉：工作是青年和老年人的事，而退休应该留给那些善于享受闲暇的人上了几岁年纪，积攒了一定的智慧和阅历，但又不算老，不但自己周身热血沸腾，而且还能感受到别人的无限激情。该办法简单易行。在经过至少十到十二年的工作以后，精力充沛、能力超群的成年人要接受一个一揽子的退休方案，其内容包括一笔可观的离职金、定期的生活津贴和足够
26、的健康保险。到 58 岁前后，这些幸运的家伙已经享受了多年无忧无虑的退休生活，可以回归雇佣行列，直到确实无法继续工作时再销声匿迹。想想每代人由此得到的好处吧！兴致勃勃的年青人会有大把的工作机会，不再有四五十岁的讨厌鬼挡住他们向上爬。那些傲慢、成熟、正值盛年的家伙们正在地球上到处游荡，做着他们想做的事。从该方案中受益最多的，恐怕要算那些如今被看作是废人却仍想发挥余热的 50、60、70 多岁的人。按我的这一设想，当这群人重归劳动者行列时，他们积蓄了超人的能量，有着丰富的人生体验，充分理解无业的苦闷。这些勤奋、谦和的老人对任何一个机构来说都将是一笔巨大的财富和年轻的同事相比，他们干活多，消耗少，只
27、要能给他们工作机会，体现其价值，他们会感激涕零，心甘情愿为你效劳。对于这种感觉，只要在退休村里呆过一个下午，任谁都能体会出来。II. 汉译英（ 50 分）Traditional letter writing is a process of writing the letter, addressing the envelope, affixing the postage, and sending them out. Though taking much longer than the e-mail, exquisiteness can be felt in the process, and th
28、e writers passion is incorporated into the pen and paper. At the same time, you can also imagine the way the other party will receive the letter. This long process prolongs the mentality of being delightful or melancholy. An email, however, is at the click of the mouse, always accomplished in haste
29、and in a business fashion. The tidy characters that line up on the screen windows look exactly like the vegetable and fruit grown nice and beautiful with the help of chemical fertilizers. In this way, the internal verve of the Chinese handwriting and the temperament of the writer become totally abse
30、nt. We often describe womens handwriting as “graceful”, but on screen display, even the difference that handwriting makes about the sex of the writer has disappeared.I dont mean to say that the computer is repulsive as I myself am enjoying its 5convenience. Nevertheless, when I intend to write to my
31、 intimate ones, I still prefer pen and paper, due to my belief that handwriting actually conveys life and passion to the extent that as I write part of my life is carried away with it. For me keyboarding is no more than dictating to another person what you hope to writea situation much like the expe
32、rience of making a telephone call while you can clearly hear the breath of the other side but are unable to speak out what you intend to say, so finally you resort to writing them a letter instead. It is amazing that difference in form and instrument will make such a difference in the resulted conte
33、nt.III. 写作（50 分）Section A(略)Section BA theory concerning the uneven distribution of the worlds languages is put forward by J. Diamond and P. Bellwood in an article published in April 25 issue of Science. According to the two researchers, the spread of those languages was caused by domestication of c
34、rop plants and the migration of the farmers 10,000 years ago following the establishment of the agriculture system, which caused the expansion of population. The conclusion was reached based on their analysis of 15 major language families, including many of the languages spoken in Africa, Asia, Europe, Arab, part of the United States, and New Zealand.
