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Anyone who has followed recent historical literature can testify to the revolution that is taking place in historical studies that currently fashionable subjects come directly from the sociology catalog: childhood, work, leisure. The new subjects are accompanied by new methods. Where history once was primarily narrative, it is now entirely analytic. The old questions "What happened?" and "How did it happen?" have given way to the question "Why did it happen?" 46) Prominent among the methods used to answer the question "Why" is psychoanalysis, and its use has given rise to psychohistory.
Psychohistory does not merely use psychological explanations in historical contexts. Historians have always used such explanations when they were appropriate and when there was sufficient evidence for them. But this practical use of psychology is not what psychohistorians intend. They are committed, not just to psychology in general, but to Freudian psychoanalysis. This commitment prevents a commitment to history as historians have always understood it. 47) Psychohistory derives its "facts" not from history, the detailed records of events and their sequences, but from psychoanalysis of the individuals who made history, and deduces its theories not from this or that instance in their lives, but from a view of human nature that transcends ( goes beyond) history. It denies the basic criterion of historical evidence: that evidence be publicly accessible to, and therefore assessable by, all historians. And it violates the basic belief of historical method: that historians be alert to the negative instances that would refute their theses. 48) Psychohistorians, convinced of the absolute rightness of their theories, are also convinced that theirs is the "deepest" explanation of any event, that other explanations fall short of truth.
Psychohistory is not content to violate the discipline of history; it also violates the past itself. 49) It denies to the past any integrity and will of its own, in which people acted out of a variety of motives and in which events had many causes and effects. It imposes upon the past the same determinism that it imposes upon the present, thus robbing people and events of their individuality and of their complexity. 50) Instead of respecting the particularity of the past, it assimilates all events, past and present, into a single deterministic schema that is presumed to be true at all times and in all circumstances
【答案解析】句首的Instead of短语较长,译成句子较好。实际上,短语译成句子,或句子译成短语,是常用的翻译方法之一。past and present置于events之后,独立出来,表示强调,可译成相应的结构。determinism,deterministic是由determine派生而来,意为“宿命论(的),定数论(的),决定论(的)”。schema在哲学上意为“先验图式”。一般地说,英译汉试题指定翻译的句子,大多是结构长而复杂的书面语,而内容的抽象性更增加了理解和翻译的难度。此文便是一例。建议大家备考期间多读些内容较抽象的论说文,议论文,将文中难解的长句不仅读懂,而且用笔头翻译出来,不断实践,长期坚持,定会提高翻译能力和水平