| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: At the end of a long task, the translator may without impropriety point out
the difficulties which he has had to encounter. These have been far
greater than he would have anticipated; nor is he at all sanguine that he
has succeeded in overcoming them. Experience has made him feel that a
translation, like a picture, is dependent for its effect on very minute
touches; and that it is a work of infinite pains, to be returned to in many
moods and viewed in different lights.
I. An English translation ought to be idiomatic and interesting, not only
to the scholar, but to the unlearned reader. Its object should not simply
be to render the words of one language into the words of another or to
preserve the construction and order of the original;--this is the ambition
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The United States Bill of Rights: or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched,
and the persons or things to be seized.
V
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime,
unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising
in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service
in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for
the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb;
nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself,
nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;
nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Cousin Betty by Honore de Balzac: It was only her knowledge of the laws and of the world that enabled
her to control the swift instinct with which country folk, like wild
men, reduce impulse to action. In this alone, perhaps, lies the
difference between natural and civilized man. The savage has only
impulse; the civilized man has impulses and ideas. And in the savage
the brain retains, as we may say, but few impressions, it is wholly at
the mercy of the feeling that rushes in upon it; while in the
civilized man, ideas sink into the heart and change it; he has a
thousand interests and many feelings, where the savage has but one at
a time. This is the cause of the transient ascendency of a child over
its parents, which ceases as soon as it is satisfied; in the man who
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