The Lure of Technologies Past
舊科技產品 為何能捲土重來
By Nick Bilton

For a glimpse of what teenagers are into these days, all you have to do is visit Abbot Kinney Boulevard in the Venice neighborhood of Los Angeles. On weekend nights, the half-mile shopping drag is packed with style-conscious kids who traipse past coffee shops, ice cream parlors and boutiques, often while taking selfies.
若要一窺時下青少年最哈的事物，只消造訪洛杉磯威尼斯區的阿伯特金尼大道即可。每逢周末夜，這條半哩長的購物街擠滿了追求風尚的孩子，他們在閒逛經過咖啡店、冰淇淋店以及精品店的同時，經常也沒忘記玩玩自拍。

Yet one of the most popular destinations for these teenagers is a white, single-story building with big pink letters on the roof that spell “Vnyl.” The store sells vinyl records, and the kids who gather there are often in awe.
然而，這群青少年最愛去的地點之一，卻是屋頂上寫有大大粉紅色字母「Vnyl」的白色單層建築。這家商店販售黑膠唱片，聚集在那兒的孩子們常常懷著敬畏之意。

“I’d say half of the teens who hang out in my store have never seen a record player before,” said Nick Alt, the founder of Vnyl. “They will walk up to the turntable, and they have no concept where to put the needle.” But once they figure out that the needle goes into the outermost groove, those smartphone-toting teenagers are hooked.
Vnyl創辦人尼克．歐特說：「我敢說在我店內閒逛的青少年，有一半從來沒有見過黑膠唱機。他們會走到唱盤前，不知道該把唱針往哪裡放。」但是，一旦他們發現唱針應該進入最外面的溝槽，這些帶著智慧手機的青少年可就著了迷。

As a reporter who has been covering technology for The New York Times for more than a decade, what I’ve come to realize is that while the new thing gets people excited, the old thing often doesn’t go away. And if it does, it takes a very long time to meet its demise.
身為採訪科技新聞已超過十年的紐約時報記者，我所了解到的是，儘管新的東西讓人們感到興奮，舊的東西往往卻不會就此消失。就算它真會消失，也要到很久以後才會銷聲匿跡。

Just look at film cameras. You would think they have been vanquished from the planet, but millions of people still use them. In 2012, more than 35 million rolls of camera film were sold, compared with 20 million the year before.
且以膠卷相機為例，你會以為它們已在地球上被淘汰了，事實上卻有數以百萬計的人仍在使用。2012年賣出的相機底片數量超過3500萬卷，而再前一年也賣了2000萬卷。

And while Polaroid has filed for bankruptcy (twice) in the age of digital cameras, the company is making a resurgence (again). One of Polaroid’s largest growing demographics, surprisingly, is teenagers who want a tangible photo but also don’t want to wait.
雖然寶麗萊在數位相機時代（兩度）聲請破產保護，該公司卻正（二度）捲土重來 。令人驚訝的是，寶麗萊最大的成長中顧客群之一，竟是想要實體照片卻不想等待的青少年。

Other types of physical media have also held on.
其他類型的實體媒介也同樣挺住了。

More than 571 million print books were sold in the United States in 2014. About 55 million newspapers still land on doorsteps every morning. As for those vinyl records, 13 million LPs were sold in 2014, the highest count in 25 years, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.
美國在2014年賣出的印刷書籍超過5.71億本。每天早上仍有約5500萬份報紙送到訂戶門口。至於黑膠唱片，美國唱片業協會指出，2014年賣出1300萬張LP唱片，為25年來最高數量。

So why does old tech survive and, in some cases, undergo a revival? For some consumers, it’s about familiarity (e.g., newspapers and print books), while for others, it’s about nostalgia (e.g., record players and film cameras).
那麼試問，為什麼舊的科技產品會存活下來，在某些情況下甚至還再度流行？對一些消費者而言，這與孰悉感有關（如：報紙與印刷書籍），而對另一些人來說，則與懷舊有關（如：黑膠唱機與膠卷相機）。

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/17/style/vinyl-records-books-film-cameras-die-hard.html

2016-04-17．聯合報．D2．紐約時報賞析．陳韋廷譯

說文解字看新聞 張佑生

好萊塢電影He’s Just Not That Into You在台灣上映時，中文片名是「他其實沒那麼喜歡妳」，正好可以說明導言第一句中into的意思。Be into something是非正式的用法，意指某項讓人感興趣、樂在其中的活動，例如He’s into surfing in a big way.（某人很瘋衝浪。）

Hook有類似意思，既是「鉤住」也是「勾引」，要讓人「上鉤」：What’s the best way to hook customers? 是所有企業的課題。

導言裡有個動詞traipse，意思從單純的步行，到拖著沉重疲憊步伐，以及本文的遊蕩，得看上下文才能掌握確切意義。We spent the whole day traipsing around the town.「五陵年少金市東，銀鞍白馬渡春風。」李白〈少年行〉莫非是這個詞？

最後一段推測老科技倖存（survive/hold on），甚至重新流行（revival/resurgence）的原因，其一是對某物的familiarity（熟悉感，介系詞用with）；對人則是親密，有時過了頭，往往變成放肆。諺語：Familiarity breeds contempt.（親暱生狎侮；近之則不遜）。

第二個原因是nostalgia（戀舊、懷舊，介系詞用for）。後現代主義理論大師詹明信（Frederic Jameson）在《後現代主義或晚期資本主義的文化邏輯》（Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Later Capitalism）中提出nostalgia for the present，說的是當代文化快速變遷，新事物在短時間內驟然變成舊的，「現在」成為「過往」，因而浮現「對當下的戀舊」情緒。

Nostalgia的形容詞是nostalgic，美國民謠教母瓊拜雅（Joan Baez）在金曲〈Diamonds and Rust〉中接到失聯已久的舊愛來電，心情矛盾，唱道：Now you’re telling me/You’re not nostalgic...

Fading Tongues, Morphing Into Melody
消失中的語言 化身為音樂
By Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim

The UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger is a melancholy document, charting the 3,000 or so languages that experts predict will vanish by the end of this century. For the most part, ethnographers and linguists are helpless in the face of the gradual erasure of collective memory that goes along with this loss of linguistic diversity.
「聯合國教科文組織世界瀕危語言地圖」是份令人憂傷的文件，它記錄著大約3000種專家們預測將在本世紀結束前消失的語言。大體而言，眼看著集體記憶隨語言多樣性失去而逐步消失，人類學家跟語言學家都感到無能為力。

Time to call in the composers?
號召作曲家來幫忙的時候是不是到了？

A growing number of them are turning their attention to languages that are extinct, endangered or particular to tiny groups of speakers in far-flung places with the aim of weaving these enigmatic utterances into musical works that celebrate, memorialize or mourn the languages and the cultures that gave birth to them. On Saturday, April 9, at the Cologne Opera in Germany, Australian composer Liza Lim unveiled her opera “Tree of Codes,” which includes snippets of a Turkish whistling language from a small mountain village.
有愈來愈多的作曲家正把注意力轉向已滅絕，瀕危，或只有偏遠地區微小群體使用的語言，其目的是將這些費解的話語編成音樂作品，用以禮讚、紀念或是哀悼孕育它們的那些文化與語言。4月9日星期六，澳洲作曲家林麗莎（音譯）在德國科隆歌劇院推出她的歌劇「Tree of Codes」（密碼之樹，暫譯），其中包含來自土耳其山中一處小村落的口哨語言片段。

In February the New York Philharmonic performed Tan Dun’s multimedia symphony “Nu Shu,” the result of the composer’s research into a language and writing system that was passed down among the female inhabitants of a small village in Hunan province in China for 700 years. Other composers who have done their own fieldwork include Vivian Fung, who investigated minority cultures in the Chinese province of Yunnan, and Kevin James, who sought out some of the last native speakers of minority languages in the Pacific Northwest, Australia and Japan.
紐約愛樂交響樂團在2月時演出了譚盾的多媒體交響曲「女書」，而這是譚盾研究中國湖南省一處小村子中，在女性居民間流傳已700年的語言與書寫系統的成果。其他已經做過實地考察的作曲家還包括，調查中國雲南省少數民族文化的馮偉君，以及在美國西北太平洋沿岸、澳洲及日本找出最後一些以少數民族語言為母語者的凱文．詹姆斯。

The aesthetic uses to which the composers put these rare languages vary. Still, James, the founder of the Vanishing Languages Project, said that the goal was “not to set them to music, but set them as music.”
作曲家以不同的方式將這些稀有語言運用於美學上，但「消失中的語言計畫」創辦人詹姆斯表示，目的「不是將它們做成音樂，而是將它們當成音樂。」

It’s an important distinction. Classical music has proved adept at preserving a language like Latin through liturgical settings that expose listeners to a language they no longer encounter in spoken form. But works like Mozart’s Requiem or Orff’s “Carmina Burana,” with its sections in Middle High German, sprang from the same cultural soil that gave birth to their texts. By contrast, when composers reach for words that are unintelligible to all but a handful of speakers on the planet, the very notion of music as a vessel for semantic content is upended. Removed from all context and understanding, speech – a constellation of rhythm and melody, resonant vowels and percussive consonants – begins to resemble music.
這是個很重要的區別。古典音樂已證明很能保存像拉丁文這樣的語言，方式則是透過禮儀式的安排，讓聆聽者接觸一種已經聽不到人講的語言。然而像莫扎特的安魂曲或奧福有中古高地德語段落的「布蘭詩歌」這類作品，均來自於孕育它們文本的同一文化土壤。相反地，當作曲家處理地球上只有極少數人理解的語詞時，音樂作為語意內容載具的想法就會被顛覆。一旦從所有上下文關係和理解抽離，語言作為一群節奏與旋律、共鳴母音及敲擊子音的組合，便開始像音樂了。

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/03/arts/music/vanishing-languages-reincarnated-as-music.html

2016-04-17．聯合報．D2．紐約時報賞析．陳韋廷譯