2017年翻译资格考试高级口译翻译练习（13）

　　英译中

　　Since Darwin, biologists have been-firmly convinced that nature works without plan or meaning, pursuing no aim by the direct road of design. But today we see that this conviction is a fatal error. Why should evolution, exactly as Darwin knew it and described it, be planless and irrational? Do not aircraft design engineers work, at precisely that point where specific calculations and plans give out, according to the same principle of evolution, when they test the serviceability of a great number of statistically determined forms in the wind tunnel, in order to choose the one that functions best? Can we say that there is no process of natural selection when nuclear physicists, through thousands of computer operations, try to find out which materials, in which combinations and with what structural form, are best suited to the building of an atomic reactor? They also practise no designed adaptation, but work by the principle of selection. But it would never occur to anyone to call their method planless and irrational.

　　【参考译文】

　　达尔文以后的生物学家们一直相信，大自然的运行是没有计划没有意义的，不会按照预先设定的途径实现任何目的。但是，今天我们知道，这一看法是个严重的错误。为什么恰如达尔文所理解和描述的那样，进化就该是无计划和无理性的呢?飞机设计师们利用风洞检测根据统计数据制造的大量机体模型的耐用性能，在具体运算和计划不起作用的情况下，为选出功能最佳的设计，他们不也正是根据同样的进化原理进行工作的吗?核物理学家经过上万次的计算机运算，试图找出哪些材料，以怎样的结合方式，以及什么结构形式最适宜用于建造原子核反应堆，我们能够说这中间没有自然选择的过程么?他们进行的适应性调节也未经过事先设计，而是根据选择原理进行的。但是人们从未认为这种方法是无计划、无理性的。