考研英语翻译LECTURE 1 题目特征课堂讲解课堂练习Exercise 1You’ve hard a problem, you’ve thought about it till were tired, forgotten it and perhaps slept on it, and then flash! When you weren’t thinking about it suddenly the answer has come to you, as a gift from the gods.Of course all ideas don’t come like that, but the interesting thing is that so many do, particularly the most important ones. They burst into the mind, glowing with the heat of creation. How they do it is a mystery. (1)Psychology does not yet understand even the ordinary processes of conscious thought, but the emergence of new ideas by a “leap in thought” is particularly intriguing, because they have come from somewhere. For the moment let us assume that they come from the “unconscious”.(2)This is reasonable, for the psychologists use this term to describe mental processes which are unknown to the subject, and creative thought consists precisely in what was unknown becoming known.(3)It seems that all truly creative activity depends in some degree on these signals from the unconscious, and the more highly intuitive the person, the sharper and more dramatic the signals become.But growth requires a seed, and the heart of the creative process lies in the production of the original fertile nucleus from which growth can proceed. This initial step in all creation consists in the establishment of a new unity from disparate elements, of order out of disorder, of shape from what was formless. (4)The mind achieves this by the plastic reshaping, so as to form a new unit, of a selection of the separate elements derived from experience and stored in memory. Intuitions arise from richly unified experience.(5)This process of the establishment of new form must occur in pattern of nervous activity in the brain, lying below the threshold of consciousness, which interact and combine to form more comprehensive patterns. Experimental physiology has not yet identified this process, for its methods are as yet insufficiently refined, but it may be significant that a quarter of the total bodily consumption of energy during sleep goes to the brain, even when the sense organs are at rest, to maintain the activity of ten thousand million brain cells. These cells, acting together as a single organ, achieve the miracle of the production of new patterns of thought. No calculating machine can do that, for such machines can “only do what we know how to design them to do”, and these formative brain processes obey laws which are still unknown.Can any practical conclusions be drawn from the experience of genius? Is there an art of thought fro the ordinary person? Certainly there is no single road to success; in the world of the imagination each has to find his own way to use his own gift.Exercise 2It is a universally acknowledged fact that human beings possess a larger brain than animals. This allows us to coordinate our lives better and communicate with each other on a higher, more sophisticated level. Language is a mode of communication where with a limited number of wordswe can produce an infinite number of sentences. It gives us the chance to discuss ideas, and look at the world with a critical eye. (1)It is of utmost importance to note that we have developed our linguistic abilities so that we not only have the option of interacting verbally and through signs but also on a written basis.The central question to be examined is: How does language actually influence our specifically animal operations? (2)A case in point would be that when we look at an object, for example a tree, do we see it in its pure, realistic and natural way or is language imposing a certain influence in the way we look at this tree? Do we regard it as an object of nature which is a tall woody plant having a single, usually, long and straight main stem, generally with a few or no branches on its lower part? Or are we simply seeing it that way because of the context of the language in our culture?(3)Since the languages of the world differ in regard to their semantic and structural characteristics, it seems somewhat logical to argue that people speaking widely different languages would also differ in the way they viewed and thought about the world. An example may illustrate this point. If one must classify things such as camels, automobiles or snow in certain ways, then one must perceive them differently from someone who does not require to make these distinctions. Eskimos may have a number of different meanings for the word “snow”, whereas we only have one. (4)From this we can deduce that it is still debatable whether we perceive the world in its real form or whether we are affected by the language of our society without us realizing. Hence one can infer that language imposes meaning on everything existing in our world through the human being.Consequently, meaning must be placed at the center of any attempt to explain language. But, meaning lies not in the words but in the people. We use words to approximate the meanings we wish to communicate, but these words still remain imperfect and incomplete representations of our meanings. (5)After having delved deeper into this subject, we can conclude that language is the trait which decisively distinguishes man from all other creatures and that human language is arguably the single most remarkable characteristic which we have.课堂讲评Exercise 1【语篇分析】本文是一篇信息传播型文章，介绍了灵感思维的源头——潜意识的产生过程及其作用。