外语学习

Lesson 3: Preface to Culture of Narcissism

This piece is taken from a national best seller entitled Culture of Narcissismby Christopher Lasch. It is a book about American society. From thefollowing lines we can see that the author is very pessimistic. He points outthe serious problems in the west. Before you start translating, think aboutyour Chinese readers. To what extent should the translation be target-oriented? Any formal features that need to be reflected in the translation?Registers of the piece? Which sentences or phrases are hard to translation?How should concepts such as “undertranslate” and “overtranslate” be usedin the discussion? For detailed translation hints and suggestions, please seethe notes

Hardly more than a quarter-century after Henry Luce proclaimed “theAmerican century”, American confidence fallen to low ebb. Those whorecently dreamed of world power now despair of governing the city of NewYork. Defeat in Vietnam, economic stagnation, and the impendingexhaustion of natural resources have produced a mood of pessimism in highercircles, which spreads through the rest of society as people lose faith in theirleaders. The same crisis of confidence grips other capitalist countries as well.In Europe, the growing strength of communist parties, the revival of fascistmovements, and a wave of terrorism all testify, in different ways, to theweakness of established regimes and to the exhaustion of establishedtradition. Even Canada, long a bastion of stolid bourgeois dependability,now faces in the separatist movement in Quebec a threat to its very existenceas a nation.

The international dimensions of the current malaise indicate that it can notbe attributed to an American failure of nerve. Bourgeois society seems

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everywhere to have used up its store of constructive ideas. It has lost both thecapacity and the will to confront the difficulties that threaten to overwhelm it.The political crisis of capitalism reflects a general crisis of western culture,which reveals itself in a pervasive despair of understanding the course ofmodern history or of subjecting it to rational direction. Liberalism, thepolitical theory of the ascendant bourgeois, long ago lost the capacity toexplain the events in the world of welfare state and the multinationalcorporation; nothing has taken its place. Politically bankrupt, liberalism isintellectually bankrupt as well. The sciences it has fostered, once confident oftheir ability to dispel the darkness of the ages, no longer provide satisfactoryexplanations of the phenomena they profess to elucide. Neoclassicaleconomic theory can not explain the coexistence of unemployment andinflation; sociology retreats from the attempts to outline a general theory ofmodern society; academic psychology retreats from the challenge of Fraudinto the measurement of trivia. The natural sciences, having madeexaggerated claims for themselves, now hasten to announce that scienceoffers no miracle cures for social problems.

描述

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Henry Lucy was the founder of The news magazine TIME, which he edited until 1964.

[←2]

This phrase is metaphoric. In translation we can use either a Chinese metaphor or a non-metaphoric expression.

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In this long sentence, the subject is composed of three phrases, each containing an of phrase. Ifwe also use three phrases as the subject of the sentence in our translation, we may have a longand clumsy Chinese sentence. Can we expand the three English phrases into three short clauses?Besides, in the remaining part of the sentence, weakness and exhaustion are nouns, but do theyhave to be translated into nouns?