英汉翻译练习之句子翻译.doc

2.1 When you walk through a town like this-two hundred thousand inhabitants of whom at least twenty thousand own literally nothing except the rags they stand up in-when you see how the people live, and still more how easily they die, it is always difficult to believe that you are walking among human beings. All colonial empires are in reality founded upon this fact. The people have brown faces besides, there are so many of them! Are they really the same flesh as your self? Do they even have names? Or are they merely a kind of undifferentiated brown stuff, about as individual as bees or coral insects? They rise out of the earth, they sweat and starve for a few years, and then they sink back into then they are gone. And even the graves themselves soon fade back into the soil. Sometimes, out for a walk as you break your way through the prickly pear, you notice that it is rather bumpy underfoot, and only a certain regularity in the bumps tells you that you are walking over skeletons. 2.2 All people who work with their hands are partly invisible, and the more important the work they do, the less visible they are, Still, a white skin is always fairly conspicuous. In northern Europe, when you see a labourer ploughing a field, you probably give him a second glance. In a hot country, anywhere south of Gibraltar or east of Suez, the chances are that you don’t even see him, I have noticed this again and again. In a tropical landscape one’s eye takes in everything except the human beings, It takes in the dried-up soil, the prickly pear, the palm tree and the distant mountain, but it always misses the peasant hoeing at his patch. He is the same colour as the earth, and a great deal less interesting to look at. 2.3 But what is strange about these people is their invisibility. For several weeks, always at about the same time of day, the file kg old women had hobbled past the house with their firewood, and though they had registered themselves on my eyeballs I cannot truly say