英语人名、地名翻译.doc

The fact that you can look up words in a dictionary can be traced to a man named Noah Webster. He produced the first dictionary of American English. Noah Webster was a person who loved words. He was born in West Hartford, Connecticut, in 1758. Webster studied at Yale and later became a teacher and a writer. In 1782 Webster was teaching at an elementary school in Goshen, New York. He saw that the school-books he was using had left out something he felt was important. The books Webster had to use in his teaching came from England. These books were just fine for teaching English children. But they paid no attention to American culture. Remember, the United States had only just won its independence from England. Americans still educated their children the same way the British did. Noah Webster wanted to give his students an education that was strongly American. To do this, in 1783 he published a spelling book for schoolchildren. Its full title was The American Spelling Book. The spelling guide became very popular. Over the years, it sold more than a hundred million copies. Copies were still being sold during much of the 1900s. The spelling book gave Webster the idea for a dictionary of American word usage. Webster published his first dictionary in 1806. It was called the Compendious Dictionary of the English Language. Webster wanted this book to help set rules of American spelling. It contained only about a thousand words. In writing his first dictionary, Webster was preparing for something grander. In 1807 he began work on An American Dictionary of the English Language. Webster was seventy years old when he published the first edition of this important work in 1928. (289 words) 人名、地名翻译方法 外译汉 Generally speaking, proper names should be transliterated, i.e., translated phonetically in Chinese characters. People’s names are thus translated. But there are still problems. Isaac Newton 奈端 Pushkin 普式庚 Chekhov 柴霍甫 Chicago 诗家谷/之加哥 用字统一原则 约定俗成原则