TED演讲:编织我的梦(3)

（单词翻译）

Well, it's neither. It's not magic and it's not complicated.

嗯，其实都不是。它并不神奇也并不复杂。

It all just happened really, really, really fast.

只是这一切发生得十分，非常，特别快。

Computer scientists built these amazing, beautiful machines,

计算机专家制造了这些美好又奇妙的机器，

but they made them very, very foreign to us, and also the language we speak to the computers

却又让我们对它们十分陌生，电脑对我们沟通的语言也同样如此，

so that we don't know how to speak to the computers anymore without our fancy user interfaces¹.

因此，离开了精美的用户界面，我们便不知道如何与电脑交流。

And that's why no one recognized that when I was conjugating² French irregular verbs,

这也是为什么，没人发现当我研究法语动词变位时，

I was actually practicing my pattern recognition skills.

实际上，我锻炼的是自己的模式识别技能。

And when I was excited about knitting,

当我十分开心地织袜子时，

I actually was following a sequence of symbolic³ commands that included loops inside of them.

我实际上正是遵循一串符号指令，包含了众多循环命令。

And that Bertrand Russell's lifelong quest to find an exact language between English and mathematics found its home inside of a computer.

伯特兰·罗素终其一生，追求在英语与数学中找到一种准确的语言，这一追求最终在电脑中找到归宿。

I was a programmer, but no one knew it.

我那时就已然是个程序师，但没人知道。

The kids of today, they tap, swipe and pinch their way through the world.

如今的孩子们终日把玩电脑。

But unless we give them tools to build with computers, we are raising only consumers instead of creators.

但除非我们给他们工具，让他们能够利用电脑构建世界，我们培养的就只是消费者，而不是创造者。

This whole quest led me to this little girl. Her name is Ruby⁴, she is six years old.

这一追求过程让我想到这个小女孩，她叫Ruby，六岁。

She is completely fearless, imaginative and a little bit bossy⁵.

她无所畏惧，富有想象力，又有那么点强势。

And every time I would run into a problem in trying to teach myself programming like,

每当我处理问题时，每当我学习编程，

"What is object-oriented design or what is garbage collection?",

学习诸如何为面对对象设计？何为碎片帐集？

I would try to imagine how a six-year-old little girl would explain the problem.

我都会想象一个六岁的女孩会如何解释这些问题。