第一自然段

For the century before Johnson’s Dictionary was published in 1775, there had been concern about the state of the English language. There was no standard way of speaking or writing and no agreement as to the best way of bringing some order to the chaos of English spelling. Dr Johnson provided the solution.

第一自然段：

在《约翰逊词典》于1775年出版之前的一个世纪，人们对英语的状态感到担忧。没有标准的口语或书写方式，也没有就如何将英语拼写的混乱情况进行整理达成一致意见。约翰逊博士提供了解决方案。

第二自然段

There had, of course, been dictionaries in the past, the first of these being a little book of some 120 pages, compiled by a certain Robert Cawdray, published in 1604 under the title A Table Alphabeticall ‘of hard usual English words’. Like the various dictionaries that came after it during the seventeenth century, Cawdray’s tended to concentrate on ‘scholarly’ words; one function of the dictionary was to enable its student to convey an impression of fine learning.

第二自然段：

当然，在过去也曾经有过字典，最早的一本是1604年由罗伯特·考德雷编撰的一本约120页的小册子，题为《A Table Alphabeticall 'of hard usual English words'》。与之后的十七世纪出现的各种字典一样，考德雷的字典倾向于关注“学术性”的单词；字典的一个功能是让学生给人留下博学的印象。

第三自然段

Beyond the practical need to make order out of chaos, the rise of dictionaries is associated with the rise of the English middle class, who were anxious to define and circumscribe the various worlds to conquer- lexical as well as social and commercial. It is highly appropriate that Dr Samuel Johnson, the very model of an eighteenth-century literary man, as famous in his own time as in ours, should have published his Dictionary at the very beginning of the heyday of the middle class.

第三自然段：

除了实际需要将混乱变为秩序之外，字典的兴起还与英国中产阶级的崛起有关，他们渴望定义和界定要征服的各个世界-包括词汇、社会和商业。萨缪尔·约翰逊博士是十八世纪文人的典范，他在他的时代和我们的时代一样出名，因此他在中产阶级的鼎盛时期初期出版了自己的词典，这是非常合适的。

第四自然段

Johnson was a poet and critic who raised common sense to the heights of genius. His approach to the problems that had worried writers throughout the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was intensely practical. Up until his time, the task of producing a dictionary on such a large scale had seemed impossible without the establishment of an academy to make decisions about right and wrong usage. Johnson decided he did not need an academy to settle arguments about language; he would write a dictionary himself; and he would do it single-handed. Johnson signed the contract for the Dictionary with the bookseller Robert Dosley at a breakfast held at the Golden Anchor Inn near Holborn Bar on 18 June 1764. He was to be paid ￡1,575 in instalments, and from this he took money to rent 17 Gough Square, in which he set up his ‘dictionary workshop’.

第四自然段：

约翰逊是一位诗人和评论家，他将常识提升到了天才的高度。他对困扰着十七世纪末和十八世纪初的作家们的问题的处理方法非常务实。在他之前，要编写一部如此规模的词典似乎是不可能的，除非成立一个学院来决定关于语言正确与否的争论。约翰逊决定他不需要一个学院来解决关于语言的争议；他会亲自写一本词典；而且他要独自完成。约翰逊在1764年6月18日在霍尔本门附近的Golden Anchor Inn举行的早餐上与书商罗伯特·多斯利签订了《词典》的合同。他将分期付款1575英镑，并从中拿出一部分租金以租下Gough Square 17号的房屋，以建立自己的“词典工作室”。

第五自然段

James Boswell, his biographer, described the garret where Johnson worked as ‘fitted up like a counting house’ with a long desk running down the middle at which the copying clerks would work standing up. Johnson himself was stationed on a rickety chair at an ‘old crazy deal table’ surrounded by a chaos of borrowed books. He was also helped by six assistants, two of whom died whilst the Dictionary was still in preparation.

第五自然段：

他的传记作者詹姆斯·博斯维尔描述了约翰逊工作的阁楼，“布置得像一个办公室”，中间有一张长桌，抄写员们站着工作。约翰逊自己坐在一个摇摇欲坠的椅子上，在“一个破旧的普通桌子”周围被借来的书籍的混乱环绕着。他还有六个助手，其中两人在《词典》编纂期间去世。

第六自然段

The work was immense; filling about eighty large notebooks (and without a library to hand), Johnson wrote the definitions of over 40,000 words, and illustrated their many meanings with some 114,000 quotations drawn from English writing on every subject, from the Elizabethans to his own time. He did not expect to achieve complete originality. Working to a deadline, he had to draw on the best of all previous dictionaries, and to make his work one of heroic synthesis. In fact, it was very much more. Unlike his predecessors, Johnson treated English very practically, as a living language, with many different shades of meaning. He adopted his definitions on the principle of English common law-according to precedent. After its publication, his Dictionary was not seriously rivalled for over a century.

第六自然段：

这项工作非常庞大；没有图书馆可供参考，约翰逊在大约80本大号笔记本上写下了4万多个单词的定义，并用从伊丽莎白时代到他自己时代的英语作品中选取的11.4万个引文来说明它们的各种含义。他并不指望实现完全的原创性。在截止日期的压力下，他不得不借鉴所有以前字典中最好的内容，使他的工作成为一项英雄般的综合性工作。事实上，它远远超过了他的前辈们。与他的前辈不同，约翰逊非常实际地对待英语，它是一门活的语言，有着许多不同的含义。他按照英国普通法的原则采用了定义-根据先例。在出版后的一个多世纪里，他的词典没有受到严重的竞争。

第七自然段

After many vicissitudes the Dictionary was finally published on 15 April 1775. It was instantly recognised as a landmark throughout Europe. ‘This very noble work,’ wrote the leading Italian lexicographer, ‘will be a perpetual monument of Fame to the Author, an Honour to his own Country in particular, and a general Benefit to the republic of Letters throughout Europe.’ The fact that Johnson had taken on the Academies of Europe and matched them (everyone knew that forty French academics had taken forty years to produce the first French national dictionary) was cause for much English celebration.

第七自然段：

经历了许多波折，该词典最终于1775年4月15日出版。它立即被认为是整个欧洲的一个里程碑。“这部非常伟大的作品，”意大利领先的词典编纂学家写道，“将为作者带来永恒的声望，为他所在国家带来荣誉，也为整个欧洲的文学共和国带来普遍的益处。”约翰逊挑战了欧洲学院，并与之并驾齐驱（人人都知道40位法国学者用了40年时间才完成了第一部法语国家词典），这成为英国庆祝的原因。

第八自然段

Johnson had worked for nine years, ‘with little assistance of the learned, and without any patronage of the great; not in the soft obscurities of retirement, or under the shelter of academic bowers, but amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow’. For all its faults and eccentricities his two-volume work is a masterpiece and a landmark in his own words, ‘setting the orthography, displaying the analogy, regulating the structures, and ascertaining the significations of English words’. It is the cornerstone of Standard English, an achievement which, in James Boswell’s words, ‘conferred stability on the language of his country’.

第八自然段：

约翰逊工作了九年，“几乎没有学者的帮助，也没有任何大人物的赞助；他没有在安静的隐蔽之中工作，在学院的庇护下，而是在不便和干扰中，在疾病和忧愁中。”尽管存在着缺点和怪癖，他的两卷作品是一部杰作，也是他自己话语中的一个里程碑，它“确立了英语单词的拼写，展示了类比，规范了结构，并确定了含义”。它是标准英语的基石，正如詹姆斯·博斯维尔所说，“为他的祖国的语言带来了稳定”。

第九自然段

The Dictionary, together with his other writing, made Johnson famous and so well esteemed that his friends were able to prevail upon King George Ⅲ to offer him a pension. From then on, he was to become the Johnson of folklore.

第九自然段：

这本词典连同他的其他著作使约翰逊成名，并且获得了国王乔治三世的养老金。从那时起，他成为民间故事中的约翰逊。