After tearing down the language wall, Huang Xi gave a talk show at the White House, and Chinese students made their debut on the Harvard podium

As I say, as I smell.

One

In the autumn of 1995, the county government of Hangzhou sent representatives to the United States alone to find missing investors and ask for wages for migrant workers. The representative's name was Jack Ma.

At that time, Ma Yun was 31 years old, had no wealth, no ambition, and his only leaning skill was translation.

He worked as an English teacher, did foreign language broadcasting, went to the sea to found a translation agency, and was once rumored to be "the best person in Hangzhou's foreign language".

He also held the first English corner by the West Lake, deliberately arranging the activity at night, with Chinese spoken Language with the ups and downs of the lake, "when speaking English, you can't see each other clearly, and your courage is great."

His trip to the United States did not go well, and after encountering ridicule, intimidation, and fraud, Ma Yun was taken to Las Vegas and placed under house arrest on the second floor of the villa.

Eventually, he escaped and traveled to Seattle, where he met the Internet with friends and plotted to put Chinese information on the Yellow Pages.

Years later, he returned to Seattle, where he said his dream began with mastering a foreign language and seeing the world one step earlier.

In those years, translation was a scarce profession, foreign languages were golden skills, and the channels connecting the world had been opened, but in front of the passages stood a high wall of language.

The process of climbing over the wall is long and arduous. In the 1980s, the whole country regained its foreign language, and English teachers were scarce, so they could only open crash courses.

Most of these future teachers, who do not even know ABC, did not take the English test when they entered the school, but instead read Chinese newspapers, or sang Chinese songs, and their speech was clear.

The initial spark was planted, and the boom eventually drowned the times. Bo Bing became a newspaper celebrity, "Xu Guozhang English" annual bestseller, "Learn with Me" made tens of millions of viewers across the country shout English, because of the publication of its lecture notes "TV Weekly" also followed by an increase of 500,000.

"Learn from Me" French host Hua Kelin, visiting China, in a hotel in Hohhot, the waiter girl asked her in an authentic English tone, "Hello, come to a glass of gin?" ”

Of course, there was no gin, only tea, and the little girl just wanted to show off her spoken language.

Farther afield, Yu Minhong brushed New Oriental small advertisements on telephone poles, Li Yang was planning crazy English debuts, and the official airlift of 2B pencils and erasers for the TOEFL test flew into China, and the number of applicants has since doubled every year.

Countless people rushed to the top of the wall with the boom, but they still encountered embarrassment when they opened their mouths to communicate.

The director of the Center for Asian Studies at Harvard University, on a private visit to Nanjing, walked to a 5-meter vacuum in front of him, and the crowd moved to watch, but no one had the courage to come forward and speak.

A professor at the University of Foreign Chinese in Beijing recalled that he met a foreigner in Tiananmen Square in his freshman year, plucked up enough courage to open his mouth, and wanted to ask how many cars the other party had, but opened his mouth to ask how many "buses" there were.

When Dou Wentao first went abroad, because of his poor English, he was frightened and inseparable from Lu Yu, from morning to night, and finally Lu Yu said: What do you follow me to the room?

In the early 1990s, the crew of "Beijingers in New York" went to the United States to shoot, someone drove illegally, the police came forward to interrogate, the limited words were quickly empty, he could only say "No English".

The police were confused and wouldn't let me speak in English, was it in Chinese?

In those years, only a few people were able to set foot in New York, and more people looked out for the world from translated books.

Lei Jun, 18, on the shelf of the old library of Wuhan University, accidentally saw a roughly translated copy of "The Fire of Silicon Valley", excitedly couldn't sleep for several nights, and walked around the playground.

Mo Yan, 29, saw the pirated translation of "One Hundred Years of Solitude" for the first time at the Wangfujing Bookstore, and after reading five pages, he excitedly said: The novel can still be written like this.

Middle school girl Yang Lan borrowed Ben Fulei's translation of "John Christopher", and was shocked by the prologue that "the joy of life is creating".

A few years later, she was selected for the "Chia Tai Variety Show" because of her excellent foreign language, and every weekend since then, she has said to the times, "Don't look at it and don't know, the world is wonderful."

In Yangquan, Shanxi, under the bed, the teenager Liu Cixin found the dusty Verne's "Journey to the Center of the Earth".

As if light had shone into the tunnel, he knew from then on that the journey to the center of the earth was a fake, but the world farther out there was real.

Two

The story of translation in the new century begins with a subtitle group.

The ten-season-long "Friends" has been transmitted across the ocean, precipitated on the forum, and engraved into the CD-ROM, becoming the most vivid foreign language textbook for the post-80s generation.

In 2002, "Friends" fans took the lead in establishing the American drama F6 subtitle group, and since then, ace subtitle groups such as YYeTs, Eden, Phoenix Angel and Holy City Home have been born.

Four years later, the subtitle group ushered in its heyday, the American drama "Prison Break" became popular in China, and countless people stayed on the Internet, waiting for the subtitle group to solve the suspense.

Guan Xin, a college student, is one of the subtitle translators, and the more widely circulated name is "Minority". He majored in Russian in college, but because he was obsessed with translation, he taught himself English and formed a subtitle group.

At that time, the internet speed was extremely slow, Guan Xin downloaded "Prison Break" all night in the dormitory, came back to watch the next day in class, listened to the translation word by word, wrote out the original manuscript, handed it to other team members for translation and production, and finally uploaded by the students with good Network speed at home.

With grassroots ladders on top of high walls, Chinese netizens felt for the first time the thrill of synchronizing dramas and the charm of transcending languages and cultures.

When "Prison Break" was at its hottest, Guan Xin went to a theater in Guangdong to watch a movie, and before the opening, the front row discussed the prison break, he came forward to tell him that he was a translator, and everyone was surprised and surrounded, and after the scene, there were people who wanted to invite him to dinner.

Those who climbed over the walls of language became the first fire thieves. Early subtitle group members, all unpaid, participated entirely on the basis of interest.

Wang Sicong, who had signed up for the animekeep Japanese subtitle group, said in his application letter: 16 years old, in the United Kingdom, can take any job except japanese translation, broadband and machine conditions are good. Of course, I don't forget to add a sentence: I am Wang Jianlin's son.

These network translators, who gathered for interest, were nicknamed "big gods" by netizens, and their goal was to connect more worlds.

Their translation is not limited to film and television dramas, in the game circle, the grassroots Chinese group contributed a large number of Chinese games, and in Douban, netizens used ant moving to translate long-form science fiction, which the media called "drag translation".

In 2010, a subtitle group translated "Death" for Yale University's philosophy open class, and since then, it has successively launched a number of courses such as "Introduction to Ancient Greek History" and "European Civilization".

The era of wild racing eventually ended with the awakening of copyright awareness, and those wild translations finally let us see more of the world.

In 2014, the largest domestic subtitle website Shooter Gateway stopped, and the webmaster Shen Sheng said in a farewell:

I hope that the value of Shooter.com is that it can enable more people to cross the boundaries of countries and understand the different cultures of the world. If this site helps, I'm already satisfied.

When the subtitle group retired, the young people who grew up listening to Li Lei and Han Meimei had gone to the world. Although the language barrier is still tight, it is no longer unattainable.

In 2016, Dr. Jiang He of the Department of Biology of Harvard University, as a representative of outstanding graduates, gave a speech at the graduation ceremony. This is the first time in three hundred years that a Chinese student at Harvard has been qualified, and the same speaker is director Spielberg.

He Jiang used fluent English to tell the method of treating spider bites in his mother in childhood, and told the scientific principles behind it, which extended to the balanced development of science and technology in the world.

Before He Jiang, Chinese actor Huang Xi had demonstrated the power of transcending language on a larger stage. He spoke a talk show in The 2,000-person venue next to the White House, speaking In Northeastern accent English.

There was no rehearsal, no teleprompter, and the audience listened to a Chinese speak English, and laughter did not distinguish between countries.

Three

In the movie "The Wandering Earth", the Russian astronaut hands Wu Jing a headset, and the language is no longer an obstacle.

Audiences in front of the screen do not feel science fiction, with the development of the era of science and technology, the high wall of language has been constantly being climbed.

In 2015, after the American young Man Kazad lost love, he relied on drug anesthesia every day, and one day, he had no intention of opening the English version of the fantasy novel "Panlong", and indulged in it, not eating or drinking and reading more than a million words.

After that, he found three translation sites online and chased 15 Chinese online novels at the same time. Addicted to online novels, he quit drug addiction.

Since then, a large number of online novels have begun to go to sea, and the translation of these novels has been done by AI, who can even recognize special words and phrases such as "Jindan".

1000 words of translation, manual time takes 1 hour, AI single chip translation only takes 1 second, and the cost is only one percent.

Today, on the Chinese online portal, there are more than 1,700 online novels updated simultaneously in many countries, and overseas readers cannot detect the traces of the machine.

The once unbreakable wall of language began to collapse and die, and people were no longer satisfied with climbing over, but hoped to tear it down.

On social software, chatting with foreign netizens has long been common; before the epidemic, backpackers can walk freely in the city-state; China's e-commerce anchors have turned the live broadcast room overseas. Of course, chatting with foreign netizens is still a problem, and they are more silent to display goods.

In 2016, iFLYTEK, a well-known intelligent voice company in the Asia-Pacific region, launched a new translation machine, and at the press conference, Chinese executives talked with American girls who did not understand Chinese, chatted naturally, and translated accurately.

Two years later, at the iterative conference of the Xunfei translation machine, the product manager used the translation machine to turn over the classic lines of Xingye:

If you don't have a dream, what is the difference between being a person and salted fish?

What’s the difference between a man without a dream and a salted fish?

Laughter and applause abound, and high-tech translations have been embedded in life.

In May this year, iFLYTEK launched a new generation of translation machines, full of scientific and technological fuselage, innovatively adopting a dual-screen design, so that both sides can easily see one screen each.

The translator's voice translation supports 16 offline languages and 83 online languages, covering nearly 200 countries and regions. In addition, it also includes a variety of functions such as photo translation, recording translation, conversation translation, and simultaneous subtitles.

For business and study abroad people, a lightweight translation machine is like a professional translator who carries you with you.

In multinational conferences under the epidemic situation, the computer can be connected to the computer with a translator to identify and translate the audio in real time to achieve simultaneous subtitles.

When reading foreign language documents, you can easily read emails, solutions and product descriptions by taking photos to identify them.

When social gatherings, the translator is placed in it, and without any action, the conversation is displayed on the main guest screen and broadcast separately.

Under the wave of AI technology, communication barriers are disappearing, language walls are being torn down, more cultures will be perceived, and we can see the wider world.

In ancient legend, human beings once came together to build the Tower of Babel to heaven.

The tower was built to anger the gods, who tore down the tower and made people use different languages, communication was not smooth, and there were scattered places.

Now, the story of the Tower of Babel is starting over.