2017年中级笔译课后练习题（3）

　　Exercise 5

　　Reading is a pleasure of the mind, which means that it is a little like a sport: your eagerness and knowledge and quickness make you a good reader. Reading is fun, not because the writer is telling you something, but because it makes your mind work. Your own imagination works along with the author's or even goes beyond his. Your experience, compared with his, brings you to the same or different conclusions, and your ideas develop as you understand his.

　　读书愉悦心灵，这几有点儿像运动。一个优秀的读者必须要有热情、知识、速度。读书之乐不在于，作者在告诉你什么，而在于它促使你思考。你跟随作者一起想象，有时你的想象甚至超越作者。你的经验加上他的经验，可以得到相同或者不同的结论。在理解作者想法的同时，也形成了自己的观点。

　　Every book stands by itself, like a one-family house, but books in a library are like houses in a city. Although they are separate, together they all add up to something; they are connected with each other and with other cities. The same ideas, or related ones, turn up in different places; the human problems that repeat themselves in life repeat themselves in literature, but with different solutions according to different writings at different times.　每本书都隔成体系，就像一家一户的住宅。而图书馆的藏书就像是城市里千家万户的居所。尽管他们相互独立，但相互结合才有意义。家家户户彼此相连，城市与城市彼此相依。相同或相似的思想在不同的地方涌现。人类生活中反复出现的问题在文学中也会不算重现。但因时代与作品的差异，答案也各不相同。

　　Reading can only be fun if you expect it to be. If you concentrate on books somebody tells you "ought" to read, you probably won't have fun. But if you put down a book you don't like and try another till you find one that means something to you, and then relax with it, you will almost certainly have a good time--and if you become as a result of reading, better, wiser, kinder, or more gentle, you won't have suffered during the process.

　　如果你希望的话，读书也能充满乐趣。倘若你只读别人告诉你应该读的书，那么就不会感觉有乐趣而言。但是如果你放下不喜欢的，尝试阅读另外的，直到找到中意的为止，然后轻轻松松的读下去，那一定会收获一段美好时光——而且如果你因为读书而变得更优秀，更睿智，更友善，更文雅时，你就不会觉得阅读是一种折磨。

　　Exercise 6

　　In some societies people want children for what might be called familial reasons: to extend the family line or the family name, to propitiate the ancestors; to enable the proper functioning of religious rituals involving the family. Such reasons may seem thin in the modern, secularized society but they have been and are powerful indeed in other places.

　　在一些社会，人们因为所谓的一些家庭原因而想要拥有孩子：传宗接代，光宗耀祖，讨好祖辈;使得有关家庭的宗教礼仪得以正常传承。这些原因在现代世俗化社会，似显苍白，而在其他地区，它却曾一度构成并确实仍在构成强有力的原因

　　In addition, one class of family reasons shares a border with the following category, namely, having children in order to maintain or improve a marriage: to hold the husband or occupy the wife; to repair or rejuvenate the marriage; to increase the number of children on the assumption that family happiness lies that way. The point is underlined by its converse: in some societies the failure to bear children (or males) is a threat to the marriage and a ready cause for divorce.

　　.此外，还有一个家庭原因与下列范畴不无共通之处。这便是，生儿育女可以维系，改善婚姻;可以拴住丈夫或者使妻子不再无所事事;修复或者是重振婚姻;多子多孙，以为家庭幸福唯有此法。而这一点由其反面得以彰显：在某些社会，无法生儿育女(或者是、无法生育儿子)对于婚姻而言，是一个隐患，还可以作为离婚的现成借口。

　　Beyond all that is the profound significance of children to the very institution of the family itself. 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 influence 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后代对于家庭这一体制本身的意义远非如此。对于大多数人来说，只有夫妇二人并不是真正意义上的一个家庭——他们需要孩子去丰富这个二人世界，赋予这二人世界。真正意义上的家庭性质，并从后代子孙那里获得某种回报。孩子需要家，而家庭似乎也需要孩子。家庭作为一个独一无二的社会机构，至少在原则上，能在这样一个变化多端、到处都是敌对的世界能给予我们一定的安全感，慰藉。保证以及价值取向上。于大多数人而言，就字面意义上来说，也不需要一个人来维系并存在，并使其代代生息。