北京语言大学 2018 年翻译硕士【211 翻译硕士英语】考研真题

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北京语言大学 2018 年翻译硕士考研真题（回忆版）
【211 翻译硕士英语】
一、单选 10 道
前几年侧重考语法，今年侧重词汇，包括近义词、形近词辨析，侧重对题干
的理解（entitle present credit; arise、arouse 等，事实证明，各类型单选
都得兼顾），综合考察能力，参考专四单选题。
二、一篇完形填空，20 道题目
（20 空，前 10 空有选项，后 10 空自己填，多是介词、连接词这些。这一
片有点偏文学。第一段讲一部文学作品，主人公是一个老人，某天他发觉身边的
人都有点不一样，问他们都说没发生什么。某天晚上，微风推开阳台门，他才意
识到是春天来了。接下来讲另一部文学作品，一个小女孩走丢了，所有人出动，
但都没找到。村民的生活仍按部就班。但作者的本意不是写小女孩有没有被找到，
而是展现时间的变与不变）
文章来自《New Yorker》, Nov.27,2017
One of my favorite short stories is Luigi Pirandello’s beautiful, brief “A Breath
of Air.” An old man, paralyzed by a stroke, sits in his bedroom, while the life of the
household stirs around him. The old man seethes with anger and resentment, and on
this particular day he is unusually perturbed. Everyone seems to be acting strangely.
His little granddaughter enters the room, and is annoying and unruly—she runs
toward his balcony, whose glass doors she wants to open. His daughter-in-law, who
comes in to remove the child, seems not quite herself. Even the old man’s son seems
different: he uses a tone of voice that the patriarch has never heard before. What has
happened? Are they all in league against him? When he asks the servant why she is
sighing, she laughs, and he angrily dismisses her. Later, he confronts his son, who
assures him that nothing is going on, nothing has changed. But in the early evening, as
a perfumed breeze gently pushes open the balcony door, he understands: spring has
come. “The others could not see it. They could not even feel it in themselves because
they were still part of life. But he who was almost dead, he had seen and felt it there
among them… That was why they had all behaved differently, without even knowing
it.”
I thought of Pirandello’s story while reading “Reservoir 13” (Catapult), the
fourth novel by the English writer Jon McGregor. Prosaically enough, it is a portrait
of an English village during the course of thirteen years; the book awards roughly
twenty pages to each year. Prosaically enough, nothing much happens. True, at the
start of “Reservoir 13,” a teen-age girl, Rebecca Shaw, goes missing; search parties
are dispatched, divers plunge into the river, a helicopter scans the moors, the police
stage a reconstruction of her last movements. But Rebecca is never found, and the
novel isn’t really about this loss; on the contrary, McGregor delicately labors to show
with what terrifying ease the quick pulse of life displaces the lost signal of death. Life
grows over death, quite literally; the dead are at our mercy. The villagers continue the
rhythms of their lives: they farm the land, run the pub, tend the shops, and teach at the
school; they grow up and marry, they procreate, divorce, and die.
More implacably even than this human tempo, nature has its own ceaseless life
rhythms, and it is in McGregor’s incantatory, lingering account of the annual rise and
fall that his book achieves a visionary power. Like the Pirandello of “A Breath of
Air,” McGregor is alive to subtle shifts in the natural world—to the breath that
quickens and kindles in spring, to the steady, hazy lengths of summer and the
downcome of autumn, and then the slow abeyance of winter. He sees nature in its
constancy and its change, and he marks the transitions of the seasons, doing so in a
repetitive, choric manner that displays the change as constancy. Before him, in the
English tradition, come the Hardy of “Tess of the d’Urbervilles,” the Lawrence of
“The Rainbow” (whose opening pages bring alive the Biblical rhythms of
generations), and the Woolf of “The Waves” and “Between the Acts.”
In “The Waves,” Woolf returns, at regular intervals, to painterly, almost
ritualized descriptions of the sun’s passage, on a single day, from dawn to dusk:
wedges of prose like the divisions on a sundial. In the same way, McGregor uses
certain repeated sentences as crossing stones, to measure and navigate his distances.
Each new year (also the start of each new chapter) begins in the same way: “At
midnight when the year turned there were fireworks.” Throughout the novel, he
returns to an identical image of the river that flows through the village: “The river
turned over beneath the packhorse bridge and ran on towards the millpond weir.” (The
novel carries an epigraph from Wallace Stevens: “The river is moving. / The
blackbird must be flying.”) And, very beautifully, he watches time and light lengthen
and shorten. In the first year after Rebecca Shaw’s disappearance, in April, the novel
poses this question: “How was it she hadn’t been found, still, as the days got longer
and the sun cut farther into the valley and under the ash trees the first new ferns
unfurled from the cold black soil.” All is transition: “There were cowslips under the
hedges and beside the road, offering handfuls of yellow flowers to the longer days.”
三、阅读（3 篇）
篇幅较长。第一篇，单选题，讲到 gene driver，科学类，易懂。第二篇，
3 个简答题，讲到 existentialism 存在主义。第三篇，写 summary，讲到 fantasy
和 child’s story 的关系，要求多于 100 词，不能照抄原文，要包括所有的观
点。
第一篇：选项阅读，普通的专八阅读难度 5 道选择
文章来自《The New York Times》——By Carl Zimmer，Nov. 16, 2017
In 2013, scientists discovered a new way to precisely edit genes — technology
called Crispr that raised all sorts of enticing possibilities. Scientists wondered if it
might be used to fix hereditary diseases, for example, or to develop new crops.
repetitive, choric manner that displays the change as constancy. Before him, in the
English tradition, come the Hardy of “Tess of the d’Urbervilles,” the Lawrence of
“The Rainbow” (whose opening pages bring alive the Biblical rhythms of
generations), and the Woolf of “The Waves” and “Between the Acts.”
In “The Waves,” Woolf returns, at regular intervals, to painterly, almost
ritualized descriptions of the sun’s passage, on a single day, from dawn to dusk:
wedges of prose like the divisions on a sundial. In the same way, McGregor uses
certain repeated sentences as crossing stones, to measure and navigate his distances.
Each new year (also the start of each new chapter) begins in the same way: “At
midnight when the year turned there were fireworks.” Throughout the novel, he
returns to an identical image of the river that flows through the village: “The river
turned over beneath the packhorse bridge and ran on towards the millpond weir.” (The
novel carries an epigraph from Wallace Stevens: “The river is moving. / The
blackbird must be flying.”) And, very beautifully, he watches time and light lengthen
and shorten. In the first year after Rebecca Shaw’s disappearance, in April, the novel
poses this question: “How was it she hadn’t been found, still, as the days got longer
and the sun cut farther into the valley and under the ash trees the first new ferns
unfurled from the cold black soil.” All is transition: “There were cowslips under the
hedges and beside the road, offering handfuls of yellow flowers to the longer days.”
三、阅读（3 篇）
篇幅较长。第一篇，单选题，讲到 gene driver，科学类，易懂。第二篇，
3 个简答题，讲到 existentialism 存在主义。第三篇，写 summary，讲到 fantasy
和 child’s story 的关系，要求多于 100 词，不能照抄原文，要包括所有的观
点。
第一篇：选项阅读，普通的专八阅读难度 5 道选择
文章来自《The New York Times》——By Carl Zimmer，Nov. 16, 2017
In 2013, scientists discovered a new way to precisely edit genes — technology
called Crispr that raised all sorts of enticing possibilities. Scientists wondered if it
might be used to fix hereditary diseases, for example, or to develop new crops.
is the beginning of a formal analysis we need.”
Crispr makes it possible to build molecules that can find a particular sequence of
DNA inside a cell. The molecules then snip out the sequence, allowing it to be
replaced by a different one.
The technique might make it possible to introduce not just a gene engineered to
reduce fertility in, say, an invasive weasel, but also the genes for the Crispr molecules
themselves. Then the weasel would gene-edit itself.
Weasels inheriting just one copy of the low-fertility gene would end up with two
copies, which they’d pass down to offspring. Soon the whole population of invasive
weasels would be producing fewer young, until eventually the population collapsed.
Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, showed that the idea
could really work by spreading a gene in fruit flies reared in the lab. Soon afterward,
Dr. Esvelt’s own team showed that the process could make certain genes more
common in yeast.
The National Academy of Sciences released a report on gene drives in 2016.
While experts recognized a number of potential risks, they endorsed more research —
possibly including “highly controlled field trials.”
So what exactly would happen if a gene drive were set loose in the wild? Dr.
Esvelt collaborated with Charleston Noble, a graduate student at Harvard, and other
colleagues to make an informed guess.
The researchers created a detailed mathematical model that took into account
how often Crispr fails to do its job and how often mutations arise that protect a target
gene from editing, among many other factors.
The model revealed that a gene drive would be remarkably aggressive. It would
take relatively few engineered organisms to spread a new gene through much of a
population. “It only takes a handful,” said Dr. Esvelt.
That aggressiveness might be good for eradicating an invasive weasel that
couldn’t be stopped by poison baits or hunting. But if a few engineered weasels
managed to escape the local environment — or were intentionally taken somewhere
else — they could easily spread the gene drive throughout the weasel’s native habitat.
That may well mean that experiments in the real world are just too risky right
now.
“The very idea of a field trial is that it’s a trial that’s confined to an area,” Dr.
Esvelt said. “Our model indicates that this is not the case.”
“The kind of gene drive that is invasive and self-propagating is in many ways the
equivalent of an invasive species,” he added.
But safer forms of the technology might be able to attack species where they’re
invasive and not harm them elsewhere. In his own lab, Dr. Esvelt is investigating a
gene drive that can self-destruct after several generations.
Other researchers are trying to build gene drives that are tailored to invasive
populations on islands but can’t harm mainland relatives.
“I would buy into that,” said James P. Collins, an evolutionary ecologist at
Arizona State University and co-chairman of the N.A.S. committee on gene drives.
“Universal gene drives do have the downsides that these guys talk about.”
But when it comes to attempts to wipe out malaria, Dr. Esvelt draws a different
conclusion from his data.
While self-limiting gene drives might be easier to control, they may be too weak
to affect vast mosquito populations. It might well be necessary to deploy a quickly
spreading gene drive.
Dr. Esvelt’s study suggests that if one nation decided to release such genetically
engineered mosquitoes, neighboring countries quickly would become part of the
experiment — whether they liked it or not.
International negotiations might be required before such genetically modified
mosquitoes were set loose. “That’s not a question for scientists to answer on their
own,” said Jason A. Delborne, a social scientist at North Carolina State University
and a member of the N.A.S. gene drive committee.
Yet Dr. Esvelt would be willing to take that leap. “I have two kids,” he said. “If
they lived in Africa, I would say do it.”
第二篇主观阅读，3 道主观题，篇幅 4 面 A4 纸
文章来自《At the Existentialist Café》 —— By Sarah Bakewell
It is sometimes said that existentialism is more of a mood than a philosophy, and
that it can be traced back to anguished novelists of the nineteenth century, and beyond
that to Blaise Pascal, who was terrified by the silence of infinite spaces, and beyond
that to the soul-searching St. Augustine, and beyond that to the Old Testament’s
weary Ecclesiastes and to Job, the man who dared to question the game God was
playing with him and was intimidated into submission. To anyone, in short, who has
ever felt disgruntled, rebellious, or alienated about anything.
But one can go the other way, and narrow the birth of modern existentialism
down to a moment near the turn of 1932–3, when three young philosophers were
sitting in the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue du Montparnasse in Paris, catching up on
gossip and drinking the house speciality, apricot cocktails.
The one who later told the story in most detail was Simone de Beauvoir, then
around twenty-five years old and given to watching the world closely through her
elegant hooded eyes. She was there with her boyfriend, Jean-Paul Sartre, a
round-shouldered twenty-seven-year-old with downturned grouper lips, a dented
complexion, prominent ears, and eyes that pointed in different directions, for his
almost-blind right eye tended to wander outwards in a severe exotropia or
misalignment of the gaze. Talking to him could be disorienting for the unwary, but if
you forced yourself to stick with the left eye, you would invariably find it watching
you with warm intelligence: the eye of a man interested in everything you could tell
him.
Sartre and Beauvoir were certainly interested now, because the third person at
the table had news for them. This was Sartre’s debonair old school friend Raymond
Aron, a fellow graduate of the École normale supérieure. Like the other two, Aron
was in Paris for his winter break. But whereas Sartre and Beauvoir had been teaching
in the French provinces — Sartre in Le Havre, Beauvoir in Rouen — Aron had been
studying in Berlin. He was now telling his friends about a philosophy he had
discovered there with the sinuous name of phenomenology — a word so long yet
elegantly balanced that, in French as in English, it can make a line of iambic trimeter
all by itself.
Aron may have been saying something like this: traditional philosophers often
started with abstract axioms or theories, but the German phenomenologists went
straight for life as they experienced it, moment to moment. They set aside most of
what had kept philosophy going since Plato: puzzles about whether things are real or
how we can know anything for certain about them. Instead, they pointed out that any
philosopher who ask sthese questions is already thrown into a world filled with things
— or, at least, filled with the appearances of things, or ‘phenomena’ (from the Greek
word meaning ‘things that appear’). So why not concentrate on the encounter with
phenomena and ignore the rest? The old puzzles need not be ruled out forever, but
they can be put in brackets, as it were, so that philosophers can deal with more
down-to-earth matters.
The phenomenologists’ leading thinker, Edmund Husserl, provided a rallying
cry, ‘To the things themselves!’ It meant: don’t waste time on the interpretations that
accrue upon things, and especially don’t waste time wondering whether the things are
real. Just look at this that’s presenting itself to you, whatever this may be, and
describe it as precisely as possible. Another phenomenologist, Martin Heidegger,
added a different spin. Philosophers all through history have wasted their time on
secondary questions, he said, while forgetting to ask the one that matters most, the
question of Being. What is it for a thing to be? What does it mean to say that you
yourself are? Until you ask this, he maintained, you will never get anywhere. Again,
he recommended the phenomenological method: disregard intellectual clutter, pay
attention to things and let them reveal themselves to you.
‘You see, mon petit camarade,’ said Aron to Sartre — ‘my little comrade’, his
pet name for him since their schooldays — ‘if you are a phenomenologist, you can
talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!’
Beauvoir wrote that Sartre turned pale on hearing this. She made it sound more
dramatic by implying that they had never heard of phenomenology at all. In truth,
they had tried to read a little Heidegger. A translation of his lecture ‘What Is
Metaphysics?’ had appeared in the same issue of the journal Bifur as an early Sartre
essay in 1931. But, she wrote, ‘since we could not understand a word of it we failed to
see its interest’. Now they saw its interest: it was a way of doing philosophy that
reconnected it with normal, lived experience.
They were more than ready for this new beginning. At school and university,
Sartre, Beauvoir and Aron had all been through the austere French philosophy
syllabus, dominated by questions of knowledge and endless reinterpretation of the
works of Immanuel Kant. Epistemological questions opened out of one another like
the rounds of a turning kaleidoscope, always returning to the same point: I think I
know something, but how can I know that I know what I know? It was demanding,
yet futile, and all three students — despite excelling in their exams — had felt
dissatisfied, Sartre most of all. He hinted after graduation that he was now incubating
some new ‘destructive philosophy’, but he was vague about what form it would take,
for the simple reason that he had little idea himself. He had barely developed it
beyond a general spirit of rebellion. Now it looked as though someone else had got
there before him. If Sartre blanched at Aron’s news about phenomenology, it was
probably as much from pique as from excitement.
Either way, he never forgot the moment, and commented in an interview over
forty years later, ‘I can tell you that knocked me out.’ Here, at last, was a real
philosophy. According to Beauvoir, he rushed to the nearest bookshop and said, in
effect, ‘Give me everything you have on phenomenology, now!’ What they produced
was a slim volume written by Husserl’s student Emmanuel Levinas, La théorie de
l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl, or The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s
Phenomenology. Books still came with their leaves uncut. Sartre tore the edges of
Levinas’ book open without waiting to use a paperknife, and began reading as he
walked down the street. He could have been Keats, encountering Chapman’s
translation of Homer:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies, When a new planet swims into his
ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He star’d at the Pacific — and all his
men Look’d at each other with a wild surmise —Silent, upon a peak in Darien. Sartre
did not have eagle eyes and was never good at being silent, but he was certainly full
of surmises. Aron, seeing his enthusiasm, suggested that he travel to Berlin in the
coming autumn to study at the French Institute there, just as he had done. Sartre
couldstudy the German language, read the phenomenologists’ works in the original,
and absorb their philosophical energy from near at hand.
题目 1: Briefly introduce what you know about the birth of existentialism.
题目 2: List the phenomenalists and their opinions.
题目 3:文章最后提到 Sartre 为了探索哲学，买完书后迫不及待 read it when
walked across the street 与 Kants encountered someone 的事例类比，问为什么可以
类比？
第三篇阅读 summary，no less than 100 words （新题型，难度较大）
The second major criticism of fantasy is that it is childish. It is not surprising that
fantasy and children's literature have been associated with each other, because both
are essentially democratic forms -democratized by being outside the solipsistic system
of high culture. The idea of a 'canon' - a group of superior texts whose superiority is
validated by some set of privileged judges - is alien to both: and to both 'popular
culture' is a rallying cry, rather than a contradiction in terms.
But there is no reason to suppose that children and fantasy have a natural
connection, even if the struggle of imagination and generic constraints parallels the
conflict between common concepts of the 4 ALTERNATIVE WORLDS IN
FANTASY FICTION child and the adult - the expansive versus the repressed,
freedom versus discipline, freshness versus familiarity. Thus J. R. R. Tolkien's
famous dictum on the fairy tale can be applied to fantasy: 'the association of children
and fairy stories is an accident of our domestic history. ... Children as a class neither
like fairy-stories more nor understand them better than adults do' (1964: 34). In fact,
the association of fantasy with children - and childishness - is quite bizarre, in that
fantasy (at least as most often constructed)concentrates on worlds other than this one:
alternative worlds -desirable, if unattainable options. Why should this be thought to be
of interest to child readers? It is far more likely, as we shall see, with fantasists from
MacDonald to Barrie and onwards, that it is adult writers who are interested in, or
have a need for such alternatives. And so we might ask, is, to a developing child, this
world not enough? And if it is not, is it because adults have closed off its inherent
wonders?(Hence, perhaps, the criticism of C. S. Lewis that his 'Narnia' books reject
the world as (God-)given world - albeit in favour of another, more mystic version.)
Thus, a great many fantasy worlds do not cater for a developing mind at all: the
real world may be seen as being full of arbitrary, adult -controlled restrictions, but for
this is substituted another world, often of even more arcane restrictions. Similarly,
there has been, since the days of the first real example of a 'logically cohesive'
alternative world(Sullivan, 1996: 307), William Morris's The Wood Beyond the
World(1894), a tendency to exploit pseudo-medieval settings. This suggests a
regressive element, a romantic yearning (by adults) for earlier 'innocence', for an
alternative world where motivations, actions, need sand gratifications are simpler and
more direct than in the desperately complex and subtle real world.
The paradox is that the appreciation of fantasy does involve (for children as well
as adults) the use of and validation of romantically constructed 'child-like' talents - the
joy of invention and discovery, the wonder at variety and ingenuity - the fresh view of
the different, the other. The rejection of this as atavistic or childish by the
'sophisticated' adult reader has some interesting implications: as C. S.Lewis put it:
To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is
grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these are the marks of childhood
and adolescence. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear
of childishness and the desire to be very grown up. (1966: 25) INTRODUCTION:
FANTASY AND ALTERNATIVE WORLDS 5Adult criticism tends to resist this:
invented worlds cannot be 'merely' places of wonder or delight: they must mean
something else (morally, rather than inevitably) if they are to be interesting or
valuable. Manlove's complimentary comment on Terry Pratchett's The Colour of
Magic, that 'in a sense the real narrative ... is Pratchett continually outdoing himself
(1999: 136) can be taken as a negative criticism; analysts of Le Guin's writing
concentrate on the meaning rather than the fact of her wonders.
This winds back to the relatively low cultural status of fantasy for adults -
although, logically enough, fantasy for children has a respectable place in the
(adult-nominated) children's canon. This low status is compounded by the fact that
differences between fantasy and realism and between children's and adults' fantasy are
confusingly similar, and hinge on what is left out.
If fantasy is a simplifying activity - with simple acts and resolutions -it can be
seen as both an innocent activity and as a corrupting activity, depending on who is
reading it. Thus, for example, in fantasies, good and evil are polarized in a way that
they can perhaps never be – or should never be - and which all-too-dangerously are -
in a mature real world. As Robert Louis Stevenson said, of what he regarded as a
fantasy, Treasure Island, in a debate with Henry James over the 'adventure' novel:
The characters need to be presented with but one class of qualities ... Danger is
the matter with which this class of novel deals; fear, the passion with which it idly
trifles; and the characters are portrayed only so far as they realise the sense of danger
and provoke the sympathy of fear ... To add more traits, to be too clever, to start the
hare of moral or intellectual interest while we are running the fox of material interest,
is not to enrich but to stultify your tale. (Allott, 1965: 83)
（历年来 北语基英阅读原文均选自各类外刊且难度较大，很考验考生的英
语功底，尤其是对篇章的理解和概括能力，平时切记注意打好基础，并且多看
外刊。）
四、作文
作文（给了一段材料，讲到人们可以用 word 传递 meaning。但译者认为语
篇才能正确传递 meaning。要求分析译者为什么会把原文理解错，错译对读者都
有什么影响，字数大于 300。）
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