2004年考研翻译英译汉试题
The relation of language and mind has interested philosophers for many centuries. (61) The Greeks assumed that the structure of language had some connection with the process of thought, which took root in Europe long before people realized how diverse language could be.
Only recently did linguists begin the serious study of languages that were very different from their own. Two anthropologist-linguists, Franz Boas and Edward Sapir, were pioneers in describing many native languages of North and South America during the first half of the twentieth century. (62) We are obliged to them because some of these languages have since vanished, as the peoples who spoke them died out or became assimilated and lost their native languages. Other linguists in the earlier part of this century, however, who were less eager to deal with bizarre data from "exotic" language, were not always so grateful. (63) The newly described languages were often so strikingly different from the well studied languages of Europe and Southeast Asia that some scholars even accused Boas and Sapir of fabricating their data. Native American languages are indeed different, so much so in fact that Navajo could be used by the US military as a code during World War II to send secret messages.
Sapir''s pupil, Benjamin Lee Whorf, continued the study of American Indian languages. (64) Being interested in the relationship of language and thought, Whorf developed the idea that the structure of language determines the structure of habitual thought in a society. He reasoned that because it is easier to formulate certain concepts and not others in a given language, the speakers of that language think along one track and not along another. (65) Whorf came to believe in a sort of linguistic determinism which, in its strongest form, states that language imprisons the mind, and that the grammatical patterns in a language can produce far-reaching consequences for the culture of a society. Later, this idea became to be known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but this term is somewhat inappropriate. Although both Sapir and Whorf emphasized the diversity of languages, Sapir himself never explicitly supported the notion of linguistic determinism.
2004年考研翻译英译汉语参考译文（全文翻译）
语言与思维的关系数个世纪以来一直让哲学家很感兴趣。61）希腊人认为，语言的结构与思维的过程之间有某种联系。这一观点在人们尚未认识到语言的千差万别以前就早已在欧洲扎下了根。
直到最近语言学家们才开始认真研究那些与他们自己的语言大不相同的语言。在20世纪上半叶，两位人类语言学家——法兰士.博阿斯(Franz Boas)和爱德华·萨丕尔(Edward Sapir)成了研究南美和北美多种地方语言的创始人。62）我们之所以感激他们（两位先驱），是因为在此以后，这些语言中有一些已经不复存在了，这是由于说这些语言的部族或是消亡了，或者被同化从而丧失自己的本族语言。然而，本世纪更早一些时候的其他语言学家对他们却不一定那么感激，因为他们对那些来自奇异语言的古怪资料不那么有研究兴趣。63）那些新近描述的语言与得到充分研究的欧洲和东南亚地区的语言往往差别显著，以至于有些学者甚至指责博阿斯和萨丕尔编造了
