2014下半年翻译资格考试笔译初级辅导精华(9)

　　It may seem an exaggeration to say that ambition is something that can hold many of the society's disparate elements together, but it is not an exaggeration by much. Remove ambition and the essential elements of society seem to fly apart. Ambition, as opposed to mere fantasizing about desires, implies work and discipline to achieve goals, personal and social, of a kind society cannot survive without. Ambition is intimately connected with family, for men and women not only work for themselves, but partly for their families; husbands and wives are often ambitious for each other, but harbor some of their most ardent ambitions for their children. Yet to have a family nowadays-with birth control readily available, and inflation a good economic argument against having children-is nearly an expression of ambition in itself. Finally, though ambition was once the domain chiefly of monarchs and aristocrats, it has, in more recent times, increasingly become the domain of the middle classes.

　　说雄心大志能将社会中各种各样的因素集中到一起, 这听起来似乎有些夸大其词, 但其实 并没有过分夸大。没有雄心, 组成社会的诸要素就会分散开来。雄心大志与纯粹的欲望狂想 根本不同, 它意味着为实现某种个人或社会的目标而努力工作, 自戒自律, 而一个社会若没有 这样的目标就无法存在下去。雄心大志还与家庭有着十分密切的关系, 因为男男女女并不仅为自己工, 也为他们的家庭; 夫妻之间不仅相互怀有雄心大志, 更对自己的子女怀着不倦的 雄心。可时至今, 计划生育的方法随处可得, 通货膨胀又为不要孩子提供了强有力的经济借, 要组建家庭本身就成了一件需要雄心大志的事情。最后, 雄心大志曾一度是君王和贵族的领地, 可现在却越来越成为中产阶级圈内的事情了。