TED演讲之说什么 重新定义字典(7)

You didn’t break it. It’s just in a new position,

你没有破坏它,只是让它移到一个新的地方,

and that new position can be just as beautiful.

这新的地方也可以是一样美丽。

Now, if you’re no longer a traffic cop — the problem with being a traffic cop is

现在,你不再是交警–交警管理交通的问题是

there can only be so many traffic cops in any one intersection, or the cars get confused. Right?

要么你得在每个十字路口都安排交警,要么就让车辆犯糊涂。对吧?

But if your goal is no longer to direct the traffic,

然而,如果你的目标不再是指挥交通,

but maybe to count the cars that go by, then more eyeballs are better.

而是去数来往的车辆,那越多双眼睛越好。

You can ask for help! If you ask for help, you get more done. And we really need help.

你可以找人帮忙!越多人帮忙,你可以完成更多的活。我们真的很需要帮忙。

Library of Congress: 17 million books, of which half are in English.

国会图书馆有一千七百万本藏书,一半是英语,

If only one out of every 10 of those books had a word that’s not in the dictionary in it,

假设其中每十本书有一个词不在字典里,

that would be equivalent to more than two unabridged dictionaries.

那就相当于超过两本非缩略版字典的词汇量。

And I find an un-dictionaried word — a word like “un-dictionaried,” for example —

我发现没收录到字典里边的词(un-dictionaried)–以一个像“un-dictionaried”那样的未收录词为例–

in almost every book I read. What about newspapers?

在我读过的几乎每一本书里都有。还有报纸呢?

Newspaper archive goes back to 1759, 58.1 million newspaper pages.

报纸藏品从1759年开始,共有五千八百一十万个报纸页面。

If only one in 100 of those pages had an un-dictionaried word on it, it would be an entire other OED.

只要每100页报纸有一个没有收录的单词,那就相当于一整本OED(牛津英语字典)了,

That’s 500,000 more words. So that’s a lot.

超过五十万词,那是很大的词汇量。

And I’m not even talking about magazines. I’m not talking about blogs —

我还没有说到杂志,博客——

and I find more new words on BoingBoing in a given week than I do Newsweek or Time.

一周内,我在 BoingBoing发现的新词比新闻周刊或时代杂志还多。

There’s a lot going on there. And I’m not even talking about polysemy,

那里正在创造出很多的新词。这还没说到一词多义,

which is the greedy habit some words have of taking more than one meaning for themselves.

有些词有贪心的习惯,自己有好几个意思。

演讲简介

备受爱戴的纸质字典是不是注定要绝迹了?在这个充满感染力和活力的演讲里,首席字典编纂家爱琳·麦奇,从多方面看印刷字典的转型。

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