卡耐基演講·四、將所要說明的事物與聽眾熟悉的事物進行對比

有時你辛辛苦苦地忙了半天，仍然沒有把自己的意思解釋清楚。你是很清楚這件事的，可是要讓聽眾也對它明了，就需要深入解說。那該怎么辦？試試把它和聽眾熟悉的事情相比較：告訴他們這件事就和另一件事一樣，和他們所熟悉的事一樣。Sometimes you will find yourself floundering in a vain attempt to explain your meaning. It's something quite clear to you but requiring involved explanation if your hearers are to be clear about it too. What to do? Compare it with something your hearers do understand; say one thing is like the other, the strange like the familiar.

如果討論化學中對工業(yè)的一項貢獻——催化劑。你如果告訴人們這是一種物質，就是能讓別的物質改變而不會改變自己的物質。雖然簡單，然而不如說它正像是一個小男孩，在校園里又跳、又打、又鬧、又推別的孩子，結果自己卻安然無恙，從沒有遭人打過、碰過，這樣不是更好嗎？Suppose you are discussing one of chemistry's contributions to industry-a catalyst. It is a substance that causes changes to occur in other substances without changing itself. That's fairly simple. But isn't this better? It is like a little boy in a schoolyard, tripping, punching, upsetting, poking all the other children there, and never being touched by a blow from anyone else.

還有個令人驚奇又有趣的例子：傳教士想把《圣經(jīng)》翻譯成非洲附近部落的土語。其中有這樣一句：“雖然你的罪惡一片鮮紅，但它們終將白如白雪。”怎樣翻譯這一句呢？逐詞逐句照翻？那些土人從來沒有在二月的清晨掃除過街上積雪的經(jīng)驗，這樣說對土人們來說是沒有意義的，而且很荒謬。在他們的詞匯中甚至沒有“雪”這個字，他們根本不知道雪和煤炭有何差別。但他們爬上過椰子樹，然后搖下幾顆椰子作為午餐；因此，傳教士就把“白”和他們熟悉的椰子聯(lián)系起來，把那句詩改成：“雖然你的罪惡一片鮮紅，但它們終將白如椰子肉。”Some missionaries once had to face this problem of putting strange statements into familiar terms when they translated the Bible into the dialect of a tribe living in equatorial Africa. Should they translate literally? They realized that if they did, the words at times would be meaningless to the natives. They came, for example, to the lines: "Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow." Should they translate this literally? The natives didn't know snow from jungle moss. But they had often climbed coconut trees and had shaken down nuts for lunch. The missionaries likened the unknown to the known. They changed the lines to read: Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as the meat of a coconut.

在這種情況下，很難再找到比這更好的翻譯了，難道不是嗎？Under the circumstances, it would be hard to improve on that, wouldn't it?