Основы профессионально-ориентированного перевода
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Учебник английского языка для гуманитарных специальностей


Современное состояние преподавания иностранных языков в высшей школе требует нового осмысления проблем в этой области. И поэтому далеко не случаен всплеск интереса к тем формам организации учебного процесса, которые качественно могут изменить его содержание. Данный учебник предназначен, прежде всего, для переводчиков в сфере профессиональной коммуникации, а также аспирантов гуманитарных специальностей. Его содержание призвано не только повысить эффективность обучения переводу и профессиональной коммуникации, но и изменить картину личной заинтересованности обучаемых при выполнении как аудиторных, так и неаудиторных форм работы.

Цель учебника заключается в формировании базовых переводческих умений, образующих фундамент переводческой компетенции, причем акцент нами сделан на развитие тех составляющих переводческой компетенции, которые являются универсальными и могут дать обучаемым инструментарий для дальнейшего профессионального совершенствования.

Представленные в учебнике материалы насыщены профессионально-ценностными смыслами и направлены на формирование переводческой и профессионально-коммуникативной компетенций.

Учебник состоит из двух частей. Первая часть включает 15 уроков. Основу каждого урока составляют аутентичные тексты, подобранные из самых разных источников: монографий, Интернета, статей из журналов и газет на актуальные темы: психология, политика, экология, коммуникация, межличностные отношения, юриспруденция, история и т.д. Многотематическая структура учебника обусловлена тем, что он предназначен для широкого круга аспирантов, изучающих разные дисциплины, а также переводчиков в сфере профессиональной коммуникации. Каждый урок включает 20 учебных заданий.

Вторая часть разделена на два блока. Первый блок посвящен описанию грамматических трудностей перевода. Цель этого раздела – дать сумму знаний, которые формируют умения проводить грамматический анализ текста, объяснять причины переводческих неудач и определять пути решения переводческих проблем. Во второй раздел входят 18 учебных упражнений. В дидактических целях материал для этих упражнений подобран так, чтобы обучаемый имел дело с какими-то определенными видами переводческих трудностей. Данный учебный материал призван трансформировать знания, полученные при изучении первого раздела, в конкретные представления и переводческие умения практического характера.

В конце пособия приводятся также следующие справочные материалы: внешне-идентичные союзы, предлоги, наречия; основные способы словообразования; сокращения; наиболее употребительные иноязычные заимствования; сравнение британского и американского вариантов английского языка.

Учебник может быть также использован для студентов, преподавателей высших учебных заведений, а также всех изучающих английский язык.




Unit 1

Civilization evolution

1. Before you read answer the following questions.

 

1. What is your opinion of such theory as geographic determinism?

2. Do you think that such historic events as the conquest of one nation by another can be explained by this theory? Give your reasons.

3. What do you think the causes of the rise and fall of different civilizations are? Try to prove your point of view.

 

2. Read and translate the text.

 

Location, Location

The conquistadors were convinced that God was on their side, and the bloody evidence backed them up. What else but divine favor could explain how 168 Spaniards could, in 1532, massacre an army of 80,000 Incas? Over the years historians trying to come up with a better explanation have suggested that either the intellectual superiority of Europeans over Native Americans or differences in world outlook led one civilization to invent swords and steel shields and the other to progress no further than clubs and quilted armor. But a radically new vision was offered by the biologist Jared Diamond who argues that neither God nor IQs determined history's winners and losers, that the most basic fact of world history – who conquered or exterminated whom – is explained by one thing: real estate.

Diamond is trying to resuscitate the theory known as geographic determinism. This view holds that where people lived determined their degree of civilization. The immediate reason that Spaniards defeated the Incas was that the Europeans had steel swords, horses, ships and writing, and they carried germs like smallpox that wiped out some 95% of the Americas' pre-Columbian population. But the ultimate cause – why did the Europeans have these things? – turns on bio-geography: how plants and animals are distributed over the world.

At the base of the great pyramid of causes is food—growing crops and raising animals. Until about 11,000 B.C., everyone everywhere was a hunter-gatherer. But soon after, people in the Fertile Crescent (present-day Iraq) and China began to settle down and produce food. That meant that, for the first time, they could store it, too (hunter-gatherers, who are forever on the move, cannot). Food storage permitted food surpluses, that allowed populations to grow to 10 to 100 times the size of hunter-gatherer bands. Most important, surpluses freed some members of a group from having to produce food themselves. All of a sudden, full-time specialists, such as toolmakers, scribes, metalworkers and soldiers, could emerge. Food production thus led directly to both technological and social complexity. It also led to germs. Domesticated animals were literally a breeding ground for disease: smallpox originated as cowpox, measles as rinderpest in cattle, flu in pigs and ducks. Societies that did not domesticate animals, such as Native Americans before the Spanish, would not have been exposed to these killers, and so would not have developed resistance. The ultimate cause of food production led to the proximate causes of germs, literacy, technology and centralized government.

If agriculture and animal husbandry were the path to world conquest, the crucial question is why Eurasians developed them but Africans, Americans and Australians did not, or at least did not until millennia later, when it was too late to catch the Eurasians. It wasn't a difference in intelligence. Rather, some people had the luck to live where the plants and animals were easy to domesticate. Very few were. Australia had only a single domesticable plant (the macadamia nut). America's candidates, including teosinte (the ancestor of corn) and sumpfweed, all had drawbacks, such as seeds so tiny they were hardly worth harvesting or a nasty propensity to cause hay fever and skin irritation. In Africa, every worthwhile crop originated north of the Sahara; none could cross the desert and adapt to the southern climate. In contrast, 32 of the 56 wild grasses including rice and wheat are native to Eurasia. Eurasia was also home to all 5 of the world's major domesticated species, including cattle, sheep and goats. Australia had none. The Americas had only the llama; Africa, only the guinea fowl.

The fortunes, or misfortunes, of a specific region shaped the fate of its entire continent. Crops and animals domesticated in the Near East and the Mediterranean were easy to transplant across Eurasia because day length and climate do not vary as one travels east or west, the orientation of Eurasia. In contrast, the north-south orientation of Africa and the Americas meant that Andean crops and llamas suited to the cool highlands could not spread through Central America's hot lowlands. And trading crops led to trading ideas. Societies that engaged in intense exchanges of crops, livestock and farming implements were more likely to exchange other inventions. Those that did not interact were cut off from new ideas and technologies.

Diamond's unified field theory of history has triggered an intense debate. One criticism is that he neglects the power of ideas to spur civilizations. Geographic predestination does not explain why Europe subjugated China for years, even though China was the most advanced nation in the world in 1400. Nor does it explain why Europe, not China, produced a Euclid and a Newton and led the world into the modern age. Geography is powerful, but you need something more subtle to explain this. Whatever its flaws, Diamond's attempt to explain the past is one of the boldest in generations. If he's right, then pride in the power and the glories of European civilization should be tempered with a little humility: were it not for cowpox, history might have been very different.

3. Answer the questions.

 

1. Why were the Conquistadors convinced that God was on their side?

2. What explanation have historians suggested?

3. What is the most basic fact of world history?

4. What determines winners and losers according to Jared Diamond?

5. Why is food at the base of the great pyramid of causes?

6. What did food production lead to?

7. Why did it lead to such results?

8. What was the difference between the development of the civilization of Eurasians, on the one hand, and that of Africans, Americans and Australians, on the other?

9. How did fortunes and misfortunes of a specific region shape the fate of the entire continent?

10. Are there any gaps, flaws, drawbacks or contradictions in the geographic predestination theory? If so, what are they?

 

4. Match the words on the left with the definitions on the right.

 

1. massacre                         a) (a large area of) barren land, waterless and treeless,

often sand-covered

2. divine favour                  b) power of grasping the truth that underlies facts

3. evidence                         c) natural tendency

4. world outlook                 d) person’s general view of life

5. vision                             e) (number of) people living in a place

6. to conquer                                f) anything that gives reason to believing something,

that makes clear or proves something

7. to exterminate                g) to destroy completely

8. population                      h) God’s goodwill

9. propensity                           i) to take possession of by force

10. desert                            j) cruel killing of a large number of defenceless

people

 

5. Find antonyms of the following words and word combinations in the text.

 

1. inferiority                                          6. lack

2. similarities                               7. part-time specialists

3. regress                                     8. simplicity

4. winner                                     9. early

5. at the top                                 10.failure

 

6. Translate the following sentences from Russian into English.

 

1. Как известно, проблема возникновения и развития цивилизации еще далека от разрешения.

2. На протяжении многих лет ученые, занимающиеся этой проблемой, выдвигают различные гипотезы и спорят о причинах и условиях зарождения цивилизаций.

3. Некоторые гипотезы отвергались сразу, по поводу других велись жаркие дискуссии.

4. Теории, создаваемые на основе различных гипотез, предлагали различные объяснения происхождения цивилизации, основанные как на интеллектуальном превосходстве европейцев над североамериканцами, так и на различии в мировоззрении.

5. В последнее время появился ряд новых теорий, среди которых особое внимание привлекает теория географического детерминизма.

 

7. Look through the text and suggest a headline.

 

Many people today have an idea of "culture" that developed in Europe during the 18th and early 19th centuries. This notion of culture reflects inequalities within European societies, and between European powers and their colonies around the world. It identifies "culture" with "civilization" and contrasts it with "nature." According to this way of thinking, one can classify some countries as more civilized than others, and some people as more cultured than others.

Some cultural theorists have thus tried to eliminate popular or mass culture from the definition of culture. Theorists such as Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) or the Leavisites regard culture as simply the result of "the best that has been thought and said in the world” Arnold contrasts mass/popular culture with social chaos or anarchy. On this account, culture links closely with social cultivation: the progressive refinement of human behavior. Arnold consistently uses the word this way: "... culture is a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world".

In practice, culture referred to élite activities such as museum-caliber art and classical music, and the word “cultured” described people who knew about, and took part in, these activities. These are often called "high culture", namely the culture of the ruling social group, to distinguish them from mass culture or popular culture. From the 19th century onwards, some social critics have accepted this contrast between the highest and lowest culture, but have stressed the refinement and sophistication of high culture as corrupting and unnatural developments that obscure and distort people's essential nature.

On this account, folk music (as produced by working-class people) honestly expresses a natural way of life, and classical music seems superficial and decadent. Equally, this view often portrays indigenous peoples as 'noble savages' living authentic unblemished lives, uncomplicated and uncorrupted by the highly-stratified capitalist systems of the West.

Today most social scientists reject the monadic conception of culture, and the opposition of culture to nature. They recognize non-élites as just as cultured as élites (and non-Westerners as just as civilized) – simply regarding them as just cultured in a different way. Thus, social observers contrast the "high" culture of élites to "popular" or pop culture, meaning goods and activities produced for, and consumed by the masses. (Note that some classifications relegate both high and low cultures to the status of subcultures.) Modern cultural theory also considers the possibility that culture itself is a product of stabilization tendencies inherent in evolutionary pressures toward self-similarity and self-cognition of societies as wholes, or tribalisms.

Researchers in evolutionary psychology argue that the mind is a system of neurocognitive information processing modules designed by natural selection to solve the adaptive problems of our distant ancestors. According to evolutionary psychologists, the diversity of forms that human cultures take are constrained by innate information processing mechanisms underlying our behavior, including: language acquisition modules, incest avoidance mechanisms, cheater detection mechanisms, intelligence and sex-specific mating preferences, foraging mechanisms, alliance-tracking mechanisms, agent detection mechanisms and fear and protection mechanisms (survival mechanisms). These mechanisms are theorized to be the psychological foundations of culture. In order to fully understand culture we must understand its biological conditions of possibility.

 

8. Find the key-words in each paragraph of the text and translate them into Russian.

 

9. Find the English equivalents of the following word-combinations in the text and translate the sentences with them into Russian in writing.

 

1. отразить неравенства

2. отождествлять понятие «культура» с понятием «цивилизация»

3. убрать массовую культуру из определения культуры

4. по этой причине

5. таким образом

6. посредством

7. стремление к совершенству

8. коренные народы

9. благородные дикари

10. рассматривать возможность

 

10. Give the summary of the text in Russian using the key-words and word-combinations from exercises 8 and 9.

 

11. Read the following text.

 

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