中英互譯比賽原文

英譯漢競賽原文：

The Posteverything Generation

I never expected to gain any new insight into the nature of my generation, or the changing landscape of American colleges, in Lit Theory. Lit Theory is supposed to be the class where you sit at the back of the room with every other jaded sophomore wearing skinny jeans, thick-framed glasses, an ironic tee-shirt and over-sized retro headphones, just waiting for lecture to be over so you can light up a Turkish Gold and walk to lunch while listening to Wilco. That’s pretty much the way I spent the course, too: through structuralism, formalism, gender theory, and post-colonialism, I was far too busy shuffling through my Ipod to see what the patriarchal world order of capitalist oppression had to do with Ethan Frome. But when we began to study postmodernism, something struck a chord with me and made me sit up and look anew at the seemingly blasé college-aged literati of which I was so self-consciously one.

According to my textbook, the problem with defining postmodernism is that it’s impossible. The difficulty is that it is so...post. It defines itself so negatively against what came before it – naturalism, romanticism and the wild revolution of modernism – that it’s sometimes hard to see what it actually is. It denies that anything can be explained neatly or even at all. It is parodic, detached, strange, and sometimes menacing to traditionalists who do not understand it. Although it arose in the post-war west (the term was coined in 1949), the generation that has witnessed its ascendance has yet to come up with an explanation of what postmodern attitudes mean for the future of culture or society. The subject intrigued me because, in a class otherwise consumed by dead-letter theories, postmodernism remained an open book, tempting to the young and curious. But it also intrigued me because the question of what postmodernism – what a movement so post-everything, so reticent to define itself – is spoke to a larger question about the political and popular culture of today, of the other jaded sophomores sitting around me who had grown up in a postmodern world.

In many ways, as a college-aged generation, we are also extremely post: post-Cold War, post-industrial, post-baby boom, post-9/11...at one point in his famous essay, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” literary critic Frederic Jameson even calls us “post-literate.” We are a generation that is riding on the tail-end of a century of war and revolution that toppled civilizations, overturned repressive social orders, and left us with more privilege and opportunity than any other society in history. Ours could be an era to accomplish anything.

And yet do we take to the streets and the airwaves and say “here we are, and this is what we demand”? Do we plant our flag of youthful rebellion on the mall in Washington and say “we are

not leaving until we see change! Our eyes have been opened by our education and our conception of what is possible has been expanded by our privilege and we demand a better world because it is our right”? It would seem we do the opposite. We go to war without so much as questioning the rationale, we sign away our civil liberties, we say nothing when the Supreme Court uses Brown v. Board of Education to outlaw desegregation, and we sit back to watch the carnage on the evening news.

On campus, we sign petitions, join organizations, put our names on mailing lists, make small-money contributions, volunteer a spare hour to tutor, and sport an entire wardrobe’s worth of Live strong bracelets advertising our moderately priced opposition to everything from breast cancer to global warming. But what do we really stand for? Like a true postmodern generation we refuse to weave together an overarching narrative to our own political consciousness, to present a cast of inspirational or revolutionary characters on our public stage, or to define a specific philosophy. We are a story seemingly without direction or theme, structure or meaning – a generation defined negatively against what came before us. When Al Gore once said “It’s the combination of narcissism and nihilism that really defines postmodernism,” he might as well have been echoing his entire generation’s critique of our own. We are a generation for whom even revolution seems trite, and therefore as fair a target for bland imitation as anything else. We are the generation of the Che Geuvera tee-shirt.

Jameson calls it “Pastiche” – “the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language.” In literature, this means an author speaking in a style that is not his own – borrowing a voice and continuing to use it until the words lose all meaning and the chaos that is real life sets in. It is an imitation of an imitation, something that has been re-envisioned so many times the original model is no longer relevant or recognizable. It is mass-produced individualism, anticipated revolution. It is why postmodernism lacks cohesion, why it seems to lack purpose or direction. For us, the post-everything generation, pastiche is the use and reuse of the old clichés of social change and moral outrage – a perfunctory rebelliousness that has culminated in the age of rapidly multiplying non-profits and relief funds. We live our lives in masks and speak our minds in a dead language – the language of a society that expects us to agitate because that’s what young people do. But how do we rebel against a generation that is expecting, anticipating, nostalgic for revolution?

How do we rebel against parents that sometimes seem to want revolution more than we do? We don’t. We rebel by not rebelling. We wear the defunct masks of protest and moral outrage, but the real energy in campus activism is on the internet, with websites like . It is in the rapidly developing ability to communicate ideas and frustration in chatrooms instead of on the streets, and channel them into nationwide projects striving earnestly for moderate and peaceful change: we are the generation of Students Taking Action Now Darfur; we are the Rock

the Vote generation; the generation of letter-writing campaigns and public interest lobbies; the alternative energy generation.

College as America once knew it – as an incubator of radical social change – is coming to an end. To our generation the word “radicalism” evokes images of al Qaeda, not the Weathermen. “Campus takeover” sounds more like Virginia Tech in 2007 than Columbia University in 1968. Such phrases are a dead language to us. They are vocabulary from another era that does not reflect the realities of today. However, the technological revolution, the revolution, the revolution of the organization kid, is just as real and just as profound as the revolution of the 1960’s – it is just not as visible. It is a work in progress, but it is there. Perhaps when our parents finally stop pointing out the things that we are not, the stories that we do not write, they will see the threads of our narrative begin to come together; they will see that behind our pastiche, the post generation speaks in a language that does make sense. We are writing a revolution. We are just putting it in our own words.

漢譯英競賽原文：

保護古村落就是保護“根性文化”

傳統村落是指擁有物質形態和非物質形態文化遺產，具有較高的歷史、文化、科學、藝術、社會、經濟價值的村落。但近年來，隨着城鎮化快速推進，以傳統村落爲代表的傳統文化正在淡化，乃至消失。對傳統村落歷史建築進行保護性搶救，並對傳統街巷和周邊環境進行整治，可防止傳統村落無人化、空心化。

古村落是歷史文化遺存的特有形式之一，是地方歷史經濟發展水平的象徵和民俗文化的集中代表。古村落文化是傳統文化的重要組成部分，它直接體現出中華姓氏的血緣文化、聚族文化、倫理觀念、祖宗崇拜、典章制度、堪輿風水、建築藝術、地域特色等。

古村落是傳統耕讀文化和農業經濟的標誌，在當前城市化巨大浪潮的衝擊之下，古村落不可避免地被急功近利所覬覦和包圍。之所以強調保護古村落，不是爲了復古，更不是爲了倡導過去的`宗族居住生活模式，而是爲了瞭解和保留一種久遠的文明傳統，最終是爲了體現現代人的一份歷史文化責任感。

古村落與其說是老建築，倒不如說是一座座承載了歷史變遷的活建築文化遺產，任憑世事變遷，斗轉星移，古村落依然巋然不動，用無比頑強的生命力向人們訴說着村落的滄桑變遷，儘管曾經酷暑寒冬，風雪雨霜，但是古老的身軀依然支撐着生命的張力，和生生不息的人並肩生存，從這點上說，滄桑的古村落也是一種無形的精神安慰。在城市進入現代化的今天，對待古村落的態度也就是我們對待文化的態度。一座古村落的被改造或者消失，也許很多人沒有感覺出丟了什麼，但是，歷史遺產少了一座古老的古村落，就少了些歷史文化痕跡，就少了對歷史文化的觸摸感，也就很容易遺忘歷史，遺忘了歷史，很難談文化延承，同時失去的還有附加在古村落上的文化魂靈。看一個地方有沒有文化底蘊，有

沒有文化割裂感，不僅要看輝煌燦爛的文物遺留，還可以從一座座古村落上感受出來，從古村落高大的廳堂、精緻的雕飾、上等的用材，古樸渾厚、巧奪天工的建築造型上感受出來。臺灣作家龍應臺曾寫過一篇和大樹保護有關的文章：一條計劃中的道路要穿過一位老人家門口，要砍倒一株老樟樹。樹小的時候，老人家還是孩子；現在，她人老了，樹也大了。如果樹能留下，老太太願意把自己的一部分房子捐出來，經過協調，工程部門同意留樹。龍應臺感慨道:“人們承認了：樹，纔是一個地方里真正的原住民，驅趕原住民，你是要三思而行的；不得不挪動時，你是要深刻道歉的。”對於古村落，不得不改造和推倒時，同樣需要三思而行。