英译中练习1
Scientific and technological advances are enabling us to comprehend the furthest reaches of the cosmos, the most basic constituents of matter, and the miracle of life. At the same time, today, the actions, and inaction, of human beings imperil not only life on the planet, but the very life of the planet. Globalization is making the world smaller, faster and richer. Still, 9/11, avian flu, and Iran remind us that a smaller, faster world is not necessarily a safer world. Our world is bursting with knowledge---but desperately in need of wisdom. Now, when sound bites are getting shorter, when instant messages crowd out essays, and when individual lives grow more frenzied, college graduates capable of deep reflection are what our world needs. For all these reasons I believed and I believe even more strongly today in the unique and irreplaceable mission of universities.
英译中练习2
There are few words which are used more loosely than the word 'civilization'. What does it mean? It means a society based upon the opinion of civilians. It means that violence, the rule of warriors and despotic chiefs, the conditions of camps and warfare, of riot and
tyranny, give place to parliaments where laws are made, and independent courts of justice in which over long periods those laws are maintained. That is civilization and in its soil grow continually freedom, comfort and culture. When civilization reigns in any country, a wider and less harassed life is afforded to the masses of the people, the traditions of the past are cherished, and the inheritance bequeathed to us by former wise or valiant men becomes a rich estate to be enjoyed and used by all.
英译中练习3
In a calm sea every man is a pilot.
But all sunshine without shade, all pleasure without pain, is not life at all. Take the lot of the happiest - it is a tangled yarn. Bereavements and blessings, one following another, make us sad and blessed by turns. Even death itself makes life more loving. Men come closest to their true selves in the sober moments of life, under the shadows of sorrow and loss.
In the affairs of life or of business, it is not intellect that tells so much as character, not brains so much as heart, not genius so much as self-control, patience, and discipline, regulated by judgment.
I have always believed that the man who has begun to live more seriously within begins to live more simply without. In an age of
extravagance and waste, I wish I could show to the world how few the real wants of humanity are.
To regret one's errors to the point of not repeating them is true repentance. There is nothing noble in being superior to some other man. The true nobility is in being superior to your previous self.
英译中练习4
Birds and Death
The bird, however hard the frost may be, flies briskly to his customary roosting-place, and, with beak tucked into his wing, falls asleep. He has no apprehensions; only the hot blood grows colder and colder, the pulse feebler as he sleeps, and at midnight, or in the early morning, he drops from his perch---death.
Yesterday he lived and moved, responsive to a thousand external influences, reflecting earth and sky in his small brilliant brain as in a looking-glass; also he had a various language, the inherited knowledge of his race, the faculty of flight, by means of which he could shoot, meteor-like, across the sky, and pass swiftly from place to place; and with it such perfect control over all his organs, such marvelous certitude in all his motions, as to be able to drop himself plumb down from the tallest tree-top , or out of the void air , on to a slender spray , and scarcely cause its leaves to
