英汉翻译练习题

Affirmative vs. Negative

1.I’m wiser than to believe what you call money talks.

2.He would do anything he was asked to do but return to his old life.

3.Africa is not kicking out western imperialism in order to invite other new masters.

4.Both sides thought that the peace proposal was one they could accept with dignity.

5.One could not be too careful in a new neighborhood.

6.Nothing is so beautiful but it betrays some defect on close inspection.

7.All graduates from the Foreign Languages Institute will not be appointed to do translation

work.

8.All the chemical energy of the fuel is not converted into heat.

9.All these various losses, great as they are, do not in any way contradict the law of

conservation of energy.

10.All other sources of heat besides the sun would not raise the temperature of the earth 1/4

degree F.

11.Not all sounds made by animals serve as language, and we have only to turn to that

extraordinary discovery of echolocation in bats to see a case in which the voice plays a strictly utilitarian role.

12.The contemporary phenomenon of motorcar worship is to be explained not least by the

sense of independence and freedom that ownership entails.

13.The target is wrong, for in attacking the tests, critics divert attention from the fault that lies

with ill-informed or incompetent users.

14.I know it is a square peg in a round hole; still, it serves after a fashion.

15.One may as well be asleep to read for anything but to improve his mind and morals, and

regulate his conduct.

16.Few things are impossible in themselves: and it is often for want of will, rather than of

means, that men fail of success.

17.In one broadcast Anna Roosevelt, the wife of President Franklin Roosevelt, said, “We

cannot be too tired to win peace if our civilization is to go on.”

18.It is nothing for a big, strong schoolboy to elbow an elderly woman aside in the dash for

the last remaining seat on the tube or bus, much less stand up and offer his seat to her, as he ought.

The Passive Voice

Put the following sentences into Chinese, paying attention to the conversion of the voice.

1.The oil of the world will have been used up, and man will be using the more convenient

power obtained from the splitting of the atom.

2.There are some radioactive isotopes which are produced artificially by bombardment of

nuclei with neutrons.

3.Care should be taken to decrease the length of time that one is subjected to loud continuous

noise.

4.Much has been said about the complexity of the nuclear power reaction.

5.Goodyear, an American, had been trying for years to find a way in which rubber could be

made hard, non-stick, and yet elastic.

6.We are taught that business letters should be written in a formal style rather than a personal

one.

7.She told me that her master had dismissed her. No reason had been given; no objection had

been made to her conduct. She had been forbidden to appeal to her mistress.

8.The increasing speed of scientific development will be obvious if one considers that TV,

space craft, and nuclear-powered ships, which are taken for granted now, would have seemed fantastic to people whose lives ended as recently as 1920.

9.The rusting of iron is one example of corrosion, which may be described as the destructive

chemical attack on a metal by media with which it comes in contact, such as moisture, air and water.

10.Pure science has been subdivided into physical science, which deals with the facts and

relations of the physical world, and biological science, which investigated the history and makings of life on the planet.

11.It has been noted with concern that the stock of books in the library has been declining

alarmingly. Students are asked to remind themselves of the rules for the borrowing and return of books, and to bear in mind the needs of other student. Penalties for overdue books will in the future be strictly enforced.

12. A current search of the files indicates that the letter id no longer in this bureau’s

possession. It is notes that the letter was received two months ago, and after study, returned to your office. In view of the foregoing, it is regretted that your office has no record of its receipt. If the letter is found, it would be appreciated if this bureau was notified at once.

Put the following sentences into Chinese, paying attention to the subordinate clauses.

1.Whatever form is used by the majority of educated speakers or writers is correct; or as

Sweet puts it, “Whatever is in general use in a language is, for that reason, grammatically, correct.

2.He boasts that a slave is free the moment his feet touch British soil and he sells the children

of the poor at six years of age to work under the lash in the factories for sixteen hours a day.

3.It is flattering to believe that they (idea) are too profound to be expressed so clearly that all

who run may read, and very naturally it does not occur to such writers that the fault is with their own minds which have not the faculty of precise reflection.

4.It is not that the scale in the one case, and the balance in the other, differ in the principle of

their construction or manner of working; but that the latter is a much finer apparatus and of course much more accurate in its measurement than the former.

5.There are several reasons why he no longer appears to be the magician the world press had

made him out to be, an illusion which he failed to discourage because, as he would admit himself, he has a tendency toward megalomania.

6.… but since what used to seem to the great majority of civilized humanity the assurance of

another life beyond the grave has come to seem to more and more people less certain, a feeling for the value of human life has become deeper and more widespread.

7.He was puzzled that I did not want what was obviously a “step” toward what all Americans

are taught to want when they grow up: money and power.

8.He poured into his writing all the pains of his life and the conviction it had brought to him

that the world could be made a better place to live in if the exploited would rise up.

9.There has long been a superstition among mariners that porpoises will have drowning men

by pushing them to the surface, or protect them from sharks by surrounding them in defensive formation.

10.Furthermore, it is obvious that the strength of a country’s economy is directly bound up

with the efficiency of its agriculture and industry, and that this in turn rests upon the efforts of scientists technologists of all kinds.

11.For example, they do not compensate for gross social inequality, and thus do not tell how

able an underprivileged youngster might have been had he grown up under more favorable circumstances.

12.It leads the discussion to extremes at the outset: it invites you to think that animals should

be treated either with the consideration humans extend to other humans, or with no consideration at all.

Put the following sentences into Chinese, paying attention to the attributive clauses.

1.Americans have a great range of customs and habits that at first may seem puzzling to a

visitor.

2.They saw the first glimmerings of the “new economic order” for which many Third World

countries have long been clamoring.

https://www.wendangku.net/doc/517819971.html,te 19th century saw all the universities in the United States adopt the credit system,

which benefited students a great deal.

4.Each day we make choices that affect our lives and sometimes the lives of others.

5.While at a museum, one can frequently rent a small recording machine that will explain the

objects on display as you move through the museum.

6.The fire season takes care of the property that managed to survive the deluge.

7.In countries where people remain in one town or city for most of their lives, the social

customs are quite different.

8.In fact, many Americans who could afford to hire a cook or driver do not employ them.

9.Private schools in the U. S. have a wide range of programs that are offered to meet the

needs of certain students.

10.Now the integrated circuit has reduced by many times the size of the computer of which it

forms a part, thus creating a new generation of portable mini-computer.

11.A few stars are known which are hardly bigger than the earth, but the majority are so large

that hundreds of thousands of earths could be packed inside each and leave room to spare;

here and there we come upon a giant star large enough to contain millions of millions of earths.

12.There is nothing more disappointing to a hostess who has gone to a lot of trouble or

expense than to have her guest so interested in talking politics or business with her husband that he fails to notice the flavor of the coffee, the lightness of the cake, or the attractiveness of the house, which may be her chief interest and pride.

Put the following sentences into Chinese, paying attention to the adverbial clauses.

1.When Zhou Enlai’s door opened they saw a slender man of more than average height with

gleaming eyes and a face so striking that it bordered on the beautiful.

2.Inexpressible was the astonishment of the little party when they returned to find that Mr.

Pickwick had disappeared.

3.When I try to understand what it is that prevents so many Americans from being as happy

as one might expect, it seems to me that there are two causes, of which one goes much deeper than the other.

4.It had been a fine, golden autumn, a lovely farewell to those who would lose their youth,

and some of them their lives, before the leaves turned again in a peacetime fall.

5.The assertion that it was difficult, if not impossible, for a people to enjoy its basic rights

unless it was able to determine freely its political status and to ensure freely its economic, social and cultural development was now scarcely contested.

6.Aluminum remained unknown until the 19th century, because nowhere in nature is it found

free, owing to its always being combined with elements, most commonly with oxygen, for which it has a strong affinity.

7.Majorie has been raised by a scheming aunt who has been planning to find a millionaire

and marry her off. So when at 17, she felt in love with a poor medical student, the aunt promptly arranged to take her niece abroad. In the 90’s that was still standard technique. 8.It was a day as fresh as grass growing up and clouds going over and butterflies coming

down can make it. It was a day compounded from silences of bee and flower and ocean and land, which were not silences at all, but motions, stirs, flutters, rising, each in its own time and matchless rhythm.

Long Sentences

Put the following sentences into Chinese, paying attention to their structures.

1.Behold! That golden sea with dazzling waves mountain-high—an immensity of wheat field

for three days’ fly, where my father stands shoulder-high, my elder brother exposing only his head, my granny falling into the sea upon her tread, above me golden billows surging like a crest of hundred feet and I hold my breath, jumping two times and three, which ends in a failure to reach the ears of wheat! (cutting)

2.There are swift flowing rivers, slow, sluggish rivers, mighty rivers with several mouths,

rivers that carry vast loads of alluvium to the sea, clear, limpid rivers, rivers that at some seasons of the year have very much more water than at others, rivers that are made to generate vast quantities of electricity by their power, and rivers that carry great volumes of traffic. (cutting)

3.Harry grew tired of watching the crowding lorries, the mount police with their effect of

sleek menace, the utility van dashing about, taking down and sending out wireless messages, the lieutenant confusedly studying the map to make out what the messages meant and appealing for aid now and then to the sergeant. ( reversing)

4.Is the claim of the G&C Merriam Company, probably the world’s greatest dictionary maker,

that the preparation of the work cost $ 3.5 million, that it required the efforts of three hundred scholars over a period of twenty-seven years, working on the largest collection of citations ever assembled in any language—is all this a fraud, a hoax? (cutting/ recasting) 5.The secret of the moon remained veiled until the latter half of the twentieth century due to

the lack of a lunar space carrier, for a series of questions concerning fuel, material, safe landing, propelling mechanism and particularly electronic computation etc. were too intricate to solve under the technical conditions early in this century, which have since been undergoing profound change and greatly improving. ( reversing/ inserting)

6.All members, in order to ensure to all of them the rights and benefits resulting from

membership, shall fulfill in good faith the obligations assumed by them in accordance with the present Charter. ( splitting )

7.Americans who would be patriots must try to learn what it is that they have in common,

what it is in the republic that is worth cherishing and preserving until they know that, their patriotism will have no more content than a bright, loud afternoon parade. ( cutting / splitting )

https://www.wendangku.net/doc/517819971.html,puter language may range from detailed low level close to that immediately

understood by the particular computer, to the sophisticated high level which can be rendered automatically acceptable to a wide range of computers. ( recasting )

9. A complex bureaucracy favors the status quo, because short of an unambiguous

catastrophe, the status quo has advantage of familiarity, and it is never possible to prove that another course would yield superior results. It seemed no accident that most great statesmen had been locked in permanent struggle with the experts in their foreign offices,

for the scope of the statesman’s conception challenges the inclination of the expert toward minimum risk. ( cutting / reversing / embedding )

10.He ranged the summer woods now, green with gloom, if anything actually dimmer than

they had been in November’s gray dissolution, where even at noon the sun fell only in the windless dappling upon the earth which never completely dried and which crawled with snakes-moccasins and water-snakes and rattlers, themselves the color of the dappled gloom so that he would not always see then until they moved; returning to camp later and later, first day, second day, passing in the twilight of the third evening the little log pen enclosing the log barn where Sam was putting up the stock for the night. ( cutting / embedding / recasting / splitting )

11.This spirit of fair-play, which in the public schools, at any rate, is absorbed as the most

inviolable of traditions, has stood our race in good stead in the professions, and especially in the administration of dependencies, where the obvious desire of the officials to deal justly and see fair-play in disputes between natives and