TED演讲 | 每场TED演讲，都可以用6个词来概括

 

欢迎光临【漂泊者联盟】第1号公众号红渡中学22班微信公众号英语学习频道

我们推荐了那么多TED演讲，一般时长都在4到18分钟不等，一篇大概2,300个词汇，但塞巴斯蒂安·韦尼克却认为，每个TED演讲用六个词就足以概括（甚至可以更少）。这么神奇？

演讲者：Sebastian Wernicke

演讲题目：1,000 TED Talks in six words

 中英文对照翻译

There's currently over a thousand TEDTalks on the TED website. And I guess many of you here think that this is quite fantastic -- except for me. I don't agree with this. I think we have a situation here. Because if you think about it, 1,000 TEDTalks, that's over 1,000 ideas worth spreading. How on earth are you going to spread a thousand ideas?

目前在TED网站上有超过上千个TED演讲，我想在场的多数人都会认为这简直太棒了--除了我，我不认同。我认为我们有这么一种情况，你想一下，1000个TED演讲，那可是1000个值得传播的想法。那么说到底如何去传播这一千个想法？

Even if you just try to get all of those ideas into your head by watching all those thousand TED videos, it would actually currently take you over 250 hours to do so. And I did a little calculation of this. The damage to the economy for each one who does this is around $15,000. So having seen this danger to the economy, I thought, we need to find a solution to this problem.

即便是将这些想法吸收到你脑子里也需要看这上千个TED视频，这就要花费你超过250个小时的时间。我稍微计算了一下，要这么做了，这相当于经济损失的价值估计约15,000美元。看到有损经济的危险，我想我们应该找个办法来解决这问题。

Here's my approach to it all. If you look at the current situation, you have a thousand TEDTalks. Each of those TEDTalks has an average length of about 2,300 words. Now take this together and you end up with 2.3 million words of TEDTalks, which is about three Bibles-worth of content.

这是我的提议：看下这个情况，这有上千个TED演讲，这些TED演讲视频有一个平均长度，大概2,300个词汇。现在放在一起所有TED演讲总计大约230万词汇，这大约相当于三本【圣经】的内容。

The obvious question here is, does a TEDTalk really need 2,300 words? Isn't there something shorter? I mean, if you have an idea worth spreading, surely you can put it into something shorter than 2,300 words. The only question is, how short can you get? What's the minimum amount of words you would need to do a TEDTalk?

明显的问题是，一个TED演讲是否需要2300个词汇？没有更短的吗？我意思是，如果你有值得传播的思想，你肯定能让它短点儿，比2300个词短。那么问题是：要多短？最少需要多少词汇？一个TED演讲能多短？

While I was pondering this question, I came across this urban legend about Ernest Hemingway, who allegedly said that these six words here: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn," were the best novel he had ever written. And I also encountered a project called Six-Word Memoirs where people were asked, take your whole life and please sum this up into six words, such as these here: "Found true love, married someone else."

当我考虑这个问题时我想起了欧内斯特·海明威的传奇故事，据说他说过一个仅仅六个词的小说 “出售：小孩的鞋，永远不会穿破。” 这是他写的最好的小说。我也有过一个项目叫“六字回忆录”，我请人们把整个人生总结在六个词里，比如：“找到过真爱，但与他人结婚。”

Or "Living in existential vacuum; it sucks." I actually like that one. So if a novel can be put into six words and a whole memoir can be put into six words, you don't need more than six words for a TEDTalk. We could have been done by lunch here. I mean ... And if you did this for all thousand TEDTalks, you would get from 2.3 million words down to 6,000. So I thought this was quite worthwhile.

或者“活于存在的空虚中，太糟了。”我喜欢这个。如果一个小说只用六个词，一整个回忆录也能用六个词，在TED上你就不需要多于六个词，我们中午前就能做完。我意思是... ... 若在全部的上千个TED演讲这么做，那么230万词就减少到6000个词汇。那我认为这太值得了。

So I started asking all my friends, please take your favorite TEDTalk and put that into six words. So here are some of the results that I received. I think they're quite nice. For example, Dan Pink's talk on motivation, which was pretty good if you haven't seen it: "Drop carrot. Drop stick. Bring meaning."

我开始问我所有朋友们，选择最喜欢的TED演讲并总结成六个词汇。我得到些结果，很不错。比如：Dan Pink关于激励的TED演讲，他的演讲很好，可总结为：“不要萝卜和大棒，要有意义”

It's what he's basically talking about in those 18 and a half minutes. Or some even included references to the speakers, such as Nathan Myhrvold's speaking style, or the one of Tim Ferriss, which might be considered a bit strenuous at times.

这就是他在18分半钟里谈的基本意思。或者还包括给演讲人的参考，比如内森·梅尔沃德的演讲类型，或者Tim Ferriss的演讲，他的演讲可能有点费力。

The challenge here is, if I try to systematically do this, I would probably end up with a lot of summaries, but not with many friends in the end. So I had to find a different method, preferably involving total strangers. And luckily there's a website for that called Mechanical Turk, which is a website where you can post tasks that you don't want to do yourself, such as "Please summarize this text for me in six words." And I didn't allow any low-cost countries to work on this, but I found out I could get a six-word summary for just 10 cents, which I think is a pretty good price.

这可是个挑战，如果我系统性地这么做，我可能要做很多总结，但很多朋友撑不到最后。所以我得找个不同办法，最好都是陌生人。幸好的是有个网站叫Mechanical Turk，你可以在这网站发布任务，任务你不用自己做，网友可以认领。比如：“请帮我用六个词汇总结这段文字，”我没有让低薪国家的人来做这个，我发现“六字总结”只需要10美分，我认为这是个好价。

Even then, unfortunately, it's not possible to summarize each TEDTalk individually. Because if you do the math, you have a thousand TEDTalks, the pay 10 cents each; you have to do more than one summary for each of those talks, because some of them will probably be, or are, really bad. So I would end up paying hundreds of dollars.

即便如此，还是有遗憾，去总结每个TED演讲是不可能的，因为你算下，有一千个TED演讲，每个10美分，你得为每个TED演讲做不止一个总结，因为有些演讲可能真的很糟。如此的话，我得支付几百美元。

So I thought of a different way by thinking, well, the talks revolve around certain themes. So what if I don't let people summarize individual TEDTalks to six words, but give them 10 TEDTalks at the same time and say, "Please do a six-word summary for that one." I would cut my costs by 90 percent. So for $60, I could summarize a thousand TEDTalks into just 600 summaries, which would actually be quite nice.

于是我想到另外一个办法，想到那些围绕特定主题的TED演讲。如果我不是让大家将单个的TED演讲总结成六个词汇，而是同时给大家10个TED演讲，并说：“请为此做六词总结”。那么成本就能砍90%，大概就是60美元我能把一千个TED演讲归到只有600个总结里来，这就特别好了。

Now some of you might actually right now be thinking, It's downright crazy to have 10 TEDTalks summarized into just six words. But it's actually not, because there's an example by statistics professor, Hans Rosling. I guess many of you have seen one or more of his talks. He's got eight talks online, and those talks can basically be summed up into just four words, because that's all he's basically showing us, our intuition is really bad. He always proves us wrong.

现在你们可能正在想，把10个TED演讲用六个词汇总结，这太疯狂了。但，情况并不总是这样，因为有个例子，统计学教授汉斯·罗斯林（TED演讲常客）。我想你们很多人都看过他一个或多个演讲。他有8个在线的TED演讲，那些演讲能被4个词汇简单地总结出来，因为这就是他展示给我们的，我们的直觉太差。他一直证明我们是错的。

So people on the Internet, some didn't do so well. I mean, when I asked them to summarize the 10 TEDTalks at the same time, some took the easy route out. They just had some general comment. There were others, and I found this quite cheeky. They used their six words to talk back to me and ask me if I'd been too much on Google lately. And finally also, I never understood this, some people really came up with their own version of the truth. I don't know any TEDTalk that contains this.

网络上的人们，有些做得并不那么好，我意思是，当我请他们一下去总结10个TED演讲时，有人就走捷径，他们只给些一般评论。还有些人，我觉得脸皮太厚了，他们用他们的六字词汇和我辩驳，并问我是否我最近用Google太多了。最终，我无法理解的是有些人真的是总结出自己版本，但我不知道有任何TED演讲包含这个。

But, oh well. In the end, however, and this is really amazing, for each of those 10 TEDTalk clusters that I submitted, I actually received meaningful summaries. Here are some of my favorites. For example, for all the TEDTalks around food, someone summed this up into: "Food shaping body, brains and environment," which I think is pretty good. Or happiness: "Striving toward happiness = moving toward unhappiness."

但，好吧，最终结果真的太令人吃惊，我提出的10个TED演讲的每个总结最后都收到有意义的总结。我中意的一些，比如，所有食品主题的TED演讲，有人总结：“美食塑体、塑脑、塑造环境” 我觉得棒极了。或关于幸福的：“努力奋斗得幸福，被动慢步得悲催。“

So here I was. I had started out with a thousand TEDTalks and I had 600 six-word summaries for those. Actually it sounded nice in the beginning, but when you look at 600 summaries, it's quite a lot. It's a huge list. So I thought, I probably have to take this one step further here and create summaries of the summaries -- and this is exactly what I did. So I took the 600 summaries that I had, put them into nine groups according to the ratings that the talks had originally received on TED.com and asked people to do summaries of those.

就是这样。我已经从一千个TED演讲着手，相对这些TED演讲，我有600个六词总结。在开始时，这听起来很好，但，当你看到600个总结时，还是很多，这是一个大列表。于是我想，我可能得更进一步，为这些总结再提炼总结----就这么做。于是我用了手头这600个总结，放在9个群组里，对应于它们在TED.com网站上的评分并请人们去做这些总结。

Again, there were some misunderstandings. For example, when I had a cluster of all the beautiful talks, someone thought I was just trying to find the ultimate pick-up line. But in the end, amazingly, again, people were able to do it. For example, all the courageous TEDTalks: "People dying," or "People suffering," was also one, "with easy solutions around." Or the recipe for the ultimate jaw-dropping TEDTalk: "Flickr photos of intergalactic classical composer." I mean that's the essence of it all.

于是，就又有了些新问题。比如，当我有一组所有关于美丽的TED演讲时，有人就以为我正试图找出“万能搭讪用语”。但最终令人吃惊的是人们又做得很好。比如，所有关于勇气的TED演讲：“人们以简易之法死去”，另外一个 “人们以简易之法去承受。”或这个令人惊叹的TED演讲：“银河系古典作曲家的Flickr图片”我的意思是：那是所有的根本。

Now I had my nine groups, but, I mean, it's already quite a reduction. But of course, once you are that far, you're not really satisfied. I wanted to go all the way, all the way down the distillery, starting out with a thousand TEDTalks. I wanted to have a thousand TEDTalks summarized into just six words -- which would be a 99.9997 percent reduction in content. And I would only pay $99.50 -- so stay even below a hundred dollars for it.

现在我有9个群组，但，这已经是很大的削减了。当然，仅仅看这些，你是不会满意的。我会尝试所有办法，能酝酿提炼的办法，这始于一千个TED演讲。我想把一千个TED演讲总结成只有6个词汇---这将减少99.9997%的内容，并且，我将只支付99.5美元，能保持在一百美元以下。

So I had 50 overall summaries done. This time I paid 25 cents because I thought the task was a bit harder. And unfortunately when I first received the answers -- and here you'll see six of the answers -- I was a bit disappointed. Because I think you'll agree, they all summarize some aspect of TED, but to me they felt a bit bland, or they just had a certain aspect of TED in them.

我总共已经做了50个总结。这次我支付25美分，因为我认为任务有点难了，令人遗憾的是当我收到答案---你能看到这六组的六词答案--我有点失望，因为，我想我们都同意，他们总结了TED的部分方面，但对于我来说没什么特点，或他们只是抓到某些TED特质。

So I was almost ready to give up when one night I played around with these sentences and found out that there's actually a beautiful solution in here. So here it is, a crowd-sourced, six-word summary of a thousand TEDTalks at the value of $99.50: "Why the worry? I'd rather wonder."

于是，我几乎要放弃了，可有一晚我在玩味这些句子，又发现了有一个漂亮的解决方法，这就是，TED演讲的一个众包式的六词总结，价值99.50美元：“为什么担心？我宁愿怀疑。”

Thank you very much.

非常感谢。

Remark：一切权益归TED所有，更多TED相关信息可至官网www.ted.com查询！

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