Модуль 2. Мировое наследие

Тексты и упражнения для письменного перевода

Упражнение 1. Определите в тексте термины и терминологические обороты, которые подлежат калькированию. Сравните полученные кальки с возможными транскрипциями. Прокомментируйте различия между ними и стилистический статус их употребления в тексте перевода. Переведите текст способом полного перевода.

ENGLISH FOR LITERARY PURPOSES

Enhanced and ennobled language for literary purposes has been bequeathed to us by writers in every century of recorded English. So too each century has yielded expository prose, whether technical, scientific, elucidatory, philosophical, or whatever. Genuine colloquial English is unevenly available before the eighteenth century, and before the present century was always likely to be ‘improved’ or modified to accord with stereotypes of one kind or another. But there is another kind of language, in its supreme forms exhibited in three main works, that is nearly always marked by its relative antiquity and formality - the ritualized language of the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, and the Hymn-book. These deserve separate treatment, and in particular because each of them has been reexamined and largely rewritten in the present century. Until recently, for most people in Britain, the Bible meant the Authorized Version of 1611, and the Book of Common Prayer that of 1662. Hymns were usually sung from “Hymns Ancient and Modern” (1861) оr the “English Hymnal” (1906).

In a series of revisions, seen by many people as deliberate acts of vandalism, the traditional language of these works set aside and ‘the language of today’ used instead. Those who welcomed the new versions expressed relief that some half-understood curiosities of seventeenth century English… had been abandoned. The rightness or wrongness of meddling with what seemed on the face of it to be three unalterable legacies of the past has proved to be one of the most disputed cultural issues of the present century in the British Isles.

Упражнение 2. Переведите текст способом полного перевода, применяя различные способы передачи реалий.

Literary culture in the middle ages

It is a well-known fact that books were rare in the Middle Ages, since they were difficult and expensive to produce and rather few people could read and write. This also appears to hold true of runic inscriptions from the Viking Age, since they are generally believed to have been the concern of a privileged minority. It is thus hardly surprising that the world we encounter in most types of medieval writing is the world of the high and mighty as seen from the perspective of a small intellectual elite within the church or the aristocracy.

Old Norse literature of the thirteenth century is often thought to be the exception to that general rule. The Icelandic family sagas, for example, seem to present the world as experienced by ordinary farmers in a fairly egalitarian society on the outskirts of medieval civilization, barely touched by the Christian culture of the European elite. The question is then whether Iceland or other parts of Scandinavia had conditions for literary production that were substantially different from those prevailing in the rest of medieval Europe. Was the average farmer more literate, the parchment cheaper, the church and other sponsors of literature more tolerant, literary education more easily available to the people?

These problems are important to consider not only for the literary scholar but also for the historian trying to determine the value of Old Norse sagas for the understanding of Early Scandinavian culture and civilization. If the sagas were in fact produced by ordinary farmers, as some scholars think they are, they could give us unique insights into the life, customs and mentality of the common people in a period when very little is known about them from other sources. If, on the other hand, the sagas - like most other types of medieval literature - were produced for the elite by a small group of clerics, they may well give us a very distorted picture of what usually happened on a Norse farm.

Упражнение 3. Переведите текст способом полного перевода, анализируя возможности преобразования синтаксических структур в их взаимосвязи с лексико-семантическим составом предложений.

English villagers

By G. M. Trevelyan

The early years of the nineteenth century saw English villagers crossing oceans, and many others drifting into the industrial districts at home. Here, with the ‘age of coal and iron’ come in earnest, a new order of life was beginning, and the circumstances under which it began led to a new kind of unrest.

Immigrants to the mining and industrial districts were leaving an old rural world essentially conservative in its social structure and moral atmosphere, and were dumped down in neglected heaps that soon fermented as neglected heaps will do, becoming highly combustible matter. Very often their food, clothing and wages were less bad than they had been in the farms and country cottages they had left. And they had more independence than the agricultural labourer whose wages were eked out by poor relief. But migration to the factories had meant loss as well as gain. The beauty of field and wood and hedge, the immemorial customs of rural life - the village green and its games, the customs of spring and harvest, the field sports - had supplied a humane background and an age-long tradition to temper poverty.

They were not reproduced in mine or factory, or in the rows of mass-produced brick dwellings erected to house the hands. The old rural cottages whence they came had indeed often been worse places to live in materially, picturesque but ruinous and insalubrious. Yet it was not impossible to have some feeling for a rickety window embowered in honeysuckle, or a leaking roof that harboured moss and doves! Such affection could not be transferred to town slums. It cannot even today be felt for the model workman’s flat.

“Cambridge Proficiency”, June

Упражнение 4. Переведите текст способом полного перевода, анализируя условия применения синтаксических преобразований. Поясните использованные приемы с точки зрения информационной эффективности.