Ted現在是享譽世界的演講平臺。每半年舉行一次，Ted邀請世界上的思想領袖與實干家來分享他們熱愛的的事業。很多人都會觀看Ted視頻。今天小編分享一篇ted如果你真的想閱讀全世界，全世界都來幫你演講稿，供大家欣賞。

      It's often said that you can tell a lot about a person by looking at what's on their bookshelves. What do my bookshelves say about me? Well, when I asked myself this question a few years ago, I made an alarming discovery. I'd always thought of myself as a fairly cultured, cosmopolitan sort of person. But my bookshelves told a rather different story. Pretty much all the titles on them were by British or North American authors, and there was almost nothing in translation. Discovering this massive, cultural blind spot in my reading came as quite a shock.

　　And when I thought about it, it seemed like a real shame. I knew there had to be lots of amazing stories out there by writers working in languages other than English. And it seemed really sad to think that my reading habits meant I would probably never encounter them. So, I decided to prescribe myself an intensive course of global reading. 2012 was set to be a very international year for the UK; it was the year of the London Olympics. And so I decided to use it as my time frame to try to read a novel, short story collection or memoir from every country in the world. And so I did. And it was very exciting and I learned some remarkable things and made some wonderful connections that I want to share with you today.

　　But it started with some practical problems. After I'd worked out which of the many different lists of countries in the world to use for my project, I ended up going with the list of UN-recognized nations, to which I added Taiwan, which gave me a total of 196 countries. And after I'd worked out how to fit reading and blogging about, roughly, four books a week around working five days a week,

　　I then had to face up to the fact that I might even not be able to get books in English from every country. Only around 4.5 percent of the literary works published each year in the UK are translations,and the figures are similar for much of the English-speaking world. Although, the proportion of translated books published in many other countries is a lot higher. 4.5 percent is tiny enough to start with, but what that figure doesn't tell you is that many of those books will come from countries with strong publishing networks and lots of industry professionals primed to go out and sell those titles to English-language publishers. So, for example, although well over 100 books are translated from Frenchand published in the UK each year, most of them will come from countries like France or Switzerland.French-speaking Africa, on the other hand, will rarely ever get a look-in.

　　The upshot is that there are actually quite a lot of nations that may have little or even no commercially available literature in English. Their books remain invisible to readers of the world's most published language. But when it came to reading the world, the biggest challenge of all for me was that fact that I didn't know where to start. Having spent my life reading almost exclusively British and North American books, I had no idea how to go about sourcing and finding stories and choosing them from much of the rest of the world. I couldn't tell you how to source a story from Swaziland. I wouldn't know a good novel from Namibia. There was no hiding it -- I was a clueless literary xenophobe. So how on earth was I going to read the world?

　　I was going to have to ask for help. So in October 2011, I registered my blog,ayearofreadingtheworld.com, and I posted a short appeal online. I explained who I was, how narrow my reading had been, and I asked anyone who cared to to leave a message suggesting what I might readfrom other parts of the planet. Now, I had no idea whether anyone would be interested, but within a few hours of me posting that appeal online, people started to get in touch. At first, it was friends and colleagues. Then it was friends of friends. And pretty soon, it was strangers.

　　Four days after I put that appeal online, I got a message from a woman called Rafidah in Kuala Lumpur.She said she loved the sound of my project, could she go to her local English-language bookshop and choose my Malaysian book and post it to me? I accepted enthusiastically, and a few weeks later, a package arrived containing not one, but two books -- Rafidah's choice from Malaysia, and a book from Singapore that she had also picked out for me. Now, at the time, I was amazed that a stranger more than 6,000 miles away would go to such lengths to help someone she would probably never meet.

　　But Rafidah's kindness proved to be the pattern for that year. Time and again, people went out of their way to help me. Some took on research on my behalf, and others made detours on holidays and business trips to go to bookshops for me. It turns out, if you want to read the world, if you want to encounter it with an open mind, the world will help you. When it came to countries with little or no commercially available literature in English, people went further still.

　　Books often came from surprising sources. My Panamanian read, for example, came through a conversation I had with the Panama Canal on Twitter. Yes, the Panama Canal has a Twitter account.And when I tweeted at it about my project, it suggested that I might like to try and get hold of the workof the Panamanian author Juan David Morgan. I found Morgan's website and I sent him a message,asking if any of his Spanish-language novels had been translated into English. And he said that nothing had been published, but he did have an unpublished translation of his novel "The Golden Horse." He emailed this to me, allowing me to become one of the first people ever to read that book in English.

　　Morgan was by no means the only wordsmith to share his work with me in this way. From Sweden to Palau, writers and translators sent me self-published books and unpublished manuscripts of books that hadn't been picked up by Anglophone publishers or that were no longer available, giving me privileged glimpses of some remarkable imaginary worlds. I read, for example, about the Southern African king Ngungunhane, who led the resistance against the Portuguese in the 19th century; and about marriage rituals in a remote village on the shores of the Caspian sea in Turkmenistan. I met Kuwait's answer to Bridget Jones.

　The books I read that year opened my eyes to many things. As those who enjoy reading will know,books have an extraordinary power to take you out of yourself and into someone else's mindset, so that, for a while at least, you look at the world through different eyes. That can be an uncomfortable experience, particularly if you're reading a book from a culture that may have quite different values to your own. But it can also be really enlightening. Wrestling with unfamiliar ideas can help clarify your own thinking. And it can also show up blind spots in the way you might have been looking at the world.

　　When I looked back at much of the English-language literature I'd grown up with, for example, I began to see how narrow a lot of it was, compared to the richness that the world has to offer. And as the pages turned, something else started to happen, too. Little by little, that long list of countries that I'd started the year with, changed from a rather dry, academic register of place names into living, breathing entities.

　　Now, I don't want to suggest that it's at all possible to get a rounded picture of a country simply by reading one book. But cumulatively, the stories I read that year made me more alive than ever before to the richness, diversity and complexity of our remarkable planet. It was as though the world's stories and the people who'd gone to such lengths to help me read them had made it real to me. These days, when I look at my bookshelves or consider the works on my e-reader, they tell a rather different story. It's the story of the power books have to connect us across political, geographical, cultural, social, religious divides. It's the tale of the potential human beings have to work together.

　　And, it's testament to the extraordinary times we live in, where, thanks to the Internet, it's easier than ever before for a stranger to share a story, a worldview, a book with someone she may never meet, on the other side of the planet. I hope it's a story I'm reading for many years to come. And I hope many more people will join me. If we all read more widely, there'd be more incentive for publishers to translate more books, and we would all be richer for that.

　　Thank you.

　　人們常說，你可以通過看他們的書架是什么告訴了很多關于一個人。說我做我的書架嗎?嗯，幾年前我問自己這個問題的時候，我做了一個驚人的發現。我一直認為自己是一個相當有教養的，世界性的人。但我的書架告訴一個不一樣的故事。幾乎所有的標題都是由英國或北美的作者，而在翻譯中幾乎沒有什么。發現這個巨大的，文化盲點在我的閱讀是相當震撼。

　　當我想到它，它似乎是一個真正的恥辱。我知道有很多驚人的故事在那里的作家以外的英語語言工作。我覺得我的閱讀習慣意味著我可能永遠不會遇到他們，這似乎真的很難過。所以，我決定給自己開一個密集的全球閱讀課程。2012將是一個非常國際化的一年的英國，這是一年的倫敦奧運會。所以我決定用它作為我的時間框架，試圖從世界上的每一個國家讀一本小說、短篇小說集或回憶錄。所以我做了。這是非常令人興奮的，我學到了一些了不起的事情，并作出了一些奇妙的連接，我想與你分享今天。

　　人們常說，你可以通過看他們的書架是什么告訴了很多關于一個人。說我做我的書架嗎?嗯，幾年前我問自己這個問題的時候，我做了一個驚人的發現。我一直認為自己是一個相當有教養的，世界性的人。但我的書架告訴一個不一樣的故事。幾乎所有的標題都是由英國或北美的作者，而在翻譯中幾乎沒有什么。發現這個巨大的，文化盲點在我的閱讀是相當震撼。

　　當我想到它，它似乎是一個真正的恥辱。我知道有很多驚人的故事在那里的作家以外的英語語言工作。我覺得我的閱讀習慣意味著我可能永遠不會遇到他們，這似乎真的很難過。所以，我決定給自己開一個密集的全球閱讀課程。2012將是一個非常國際化的一年的英國，這是一年的倫敦奧運會。所以我決定用它作為我的時間框架，試圖從世界上的每一個國家讀一本小說、短篇小說集或回憶錄。所以我做了。這是非常令人興奮的，我學到了一些了不起的事情，并作出了一些奇妙的連接，我想與你分享今天。

　　結果是，實際上有相當多的國家，可能很少或甚至沒有市售的英語文學。他們的書仍然是世界上最出版的語言的讀者看不見的。但當它來到閱讀世界，對我來說最大的挑戰是，事實上，我不知道從哪里開始。花了我的生活閱讀幾乎完全是英國和北美的書籍，我不知道如何去尋找和尋找故事，并選擇他們從世界上大部分的其他地區。我無法告訴你如何從斯威士蘭給我一個故事。我不知道納米比亞的一本很好的小說。沒有隱藏，我是一個無能的文學排外。那么，我到底是如何去看世界的呢?

　　我將不得不尋求幫助。所以在十月2011，我注冊了我的博客，ayearofreadingtheworld.com，我在網上發布了一條短的吸引力。我解釋我是誰，如何縮小我的閱讀了，我問誰愿意留言提示我可能會從這個星球的其它部分。現在，我不知道是否有人會感興趣，但在幾個小時的我張貼在網上呼吁，人們開始接觸。起初，它是朋友和同事。然后是朋友的朋友。而且很快，它是陌生人。

　　四天后我把網上呼吁，我得到一個消息，一個叫Rafidah的女人在吉隆坡。她說她愛我的項目的聲音，她能去她當地的英語書店，選擇我的馬來西亞書郵寄給我嗎?我接受了熱情，和幾周后，收到了一個包裹含不是一個，而是兩本書-- Rafidah的選擇從馬來西亞，從新加坡的一本書，她還為我選的。現在，在當時，我很驚訝，一個陌生人超過6000英里以外的人會去這樣的長度，以幫助她可能永遠不會滿足的。

　　但Rafidah的善良被證明是這一年的模式。一次又一次，人們走出自己的方式來幫助我。有了代表我的研究，和別人走了彎路度假和商務旅行去書店給我。事實證明，如果你想閱讀世界，如果你想與一個開放的頭腦，遇到它，世界將幫助你。當它來到一個很少或根本沒有商業上可用的英語文學的國家，人們更進一步。

　　書籍往往來自于令人驚訝的來源。我的巴拿馬讀，例如，經過我與巴拿馬運河推特談話。是的，巴拿馬運河有一個推特帳戶。當我說它對我的項目，這表明我可能喜歡去工作的巴拿馬作者Juan David Morgan舉行。我找到了摩根的網站，我給他發了一個信息，詢問他的西班牙語小說是否已經被翻譯成英文。他說，沒有被發表，但他也有他的小說“金馬未發表的翻譯。”他發了一封電子郵件給我，讓我成為第一人讀那本英語書。

　　摩根絕不是唯一的語言與我分享，這樣他的工作。從瑞典到帕勞，作家和翻譯家給我自我出版的書籍，書未出版的手稿，沒有受到西方出版社拿起或不再可用，給我特權瞥見一些顯著的幻想世界。我讀了，例如，關于南部非洲國王Ngungunhane，誰領導了反對葡萄牙在第十九世紀;和關于婚姻的儀式在一個偏遠的村莊在土庫曼斯坦的里海海岸。我遇到了科威特的答案，瓊斯布麗姬。

　　那一年我讀的書打開了我的眼睛許多東西。當那些喜歡閱讀的人會知道，書籍有一個非凡的力量，把你從自己和別人的心態，所以，至少，你看看世界通過不同的眼睛。這可能是一個不舒服的經驗，特別是如果你正在讀一本書，從一個文化，可能有相當不同的價值觀你自己的。但它也可以是真正的啟發。與陌生的想法摔跤可以幫助澄清你自己的想法。它也可以顯示盲點的方式，你可能一直在看世界。

　　當我回顧我長大的許多英語文學作品，例如，我開始看到它是多么的狹窄，相比世界所提供的豐富性。隨著這些頁面的出現，一些其他的事情也開始發生了。漸漸地，我開始了一年的國家的名單，從一個相當枯燥的，學術登記冊的地方名字變成了生活，呼吸的實體。

　　現在，我不想建議在一個國家僅僅通過閱讀一本書就可以得到一個完整的國家的一個圓形的圖片。但是，這個故事我讀那一年使我比以前更活的豐富，多樣性和復雜性我們卓越的行星。就像是世界的故事和那些走到這么長的時間來幫助我讀他們的人，使我真正的。這些天，當我看著我的書架上或在我的電子書閱讀器考慮作品，他們告訴一個不同的故事。這是一本書的故事，必須把我們連接在政治、地理、文化、社會、宗教的鴻溝上。這是潛在的人類必須共同努力的故事。

　　而且，它證明了我們生活在一個非常時期，在那里，感謝互聯網，它比以往任何時候都更容易為一個陌生人分享一個故事，一個世界觀，一本書與人，她可能永遠不會滿足，在地球的另一邊。我希望這是一個我讀了很多年的故事。我希望更多的人會加入我的行列。如果我們都讀得更廣泛，會有更多的激勵出版商翻譯更多的書籍，我們都會更豐富的。

　　謝謝您

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