2012年考研英語翻譯真題及答案解析

Part C

Directions:

Read the following text carefully and then translate the underlined segments into Chinese. Your translation should be written carefully on ANSWER SHEET 2.(10 points)

Since the days of Aristotle, a search for universal principles has characterized the scientific enterprise. In some ways, this quest for commonalities defines science. Newton's laws of motion and Darwinian evolution each bind a host of different phenomena into a single explicatory frame work.

(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 dimensions and universes that it might entail.Nonetheless, unification of sorts remains a major goal.

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. Just as the bewildering variety of human courtship rituals might all be considered 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.

That, at least, is the hope. But a comparative study of linguistic traits published online today supplies a reality check. Russell Gray at the University of Auckland 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 suggested that humans are born with an innate language-acquisition capacity 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.

(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.

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 Greenber-gian 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.

答案解析

Part C

46.物理學(xué)領(lǐng)域，一種做法把這種尋求大同理論的沖動推向極端，試圖尋找包含一切的理論——一個涵括我們所看到的一切的成性公式。

47.這里，達爾文學(xué)說似乎做出了證明，因為如果人類有著共同的起源，那么似乎就有理由認(rèn)為文化的多樣性也可以追溯到更為有限的起源。

48.從共有特征中濾出獨有特征，這使我們得以理解復(fù)雜的文化行為是如何產(chǎn)生的，并從進化或認(rèn)知的角度理解什么引導(dǎo)了它的走向。

49.第二次努力——由喬舒亞·格林堡做出——采用更為經(jīng)驗主義的方法來研究語言的普遍性，確定了多種語言(尤其在語法詞序方面)的共有特征，這些特征被認(rèn)為是代表了由認(rèn)知限制產(chǎn)生的傾向性。

50.喬姆斯基的語法應(yīng)該顯示出語言變化的模式，這些模式并不受語言譜系路徑的影響;而格林堡式的普遍性則預(yù)言了特定的語法詞序關(guān)系類型之間所存在的緊密互依性。