评论
打印
Typing rebellion
输入法的叛逆
The Chinese language's lack of an alphabet has been a source of concern. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, it meant Chinese typewriting and telegraphy were much slower.
中文没有字母表，这一直是令人担忧的问题。在19世纪和20世纪初，这意味着用中文打字和发电报要慢得多。
Leaders including Mao Zedong believed characters were constraining China’s economic and social development. He wondered whether they should be ditched altogether in favour of an alphanumeric system.
包括毛主席在内的领导人认为，汉字制约了中国的经济和社会发展。他在考虑是否应该完全放弃方块字，转而采用字母数字系统。
The alphabet anxiety intensified when the personal-computing revolution in the West began to transform the world. Thomas Mullaney, a professor at Stanford University, has written an informative and enjoyable history of how China addressed this crucial technical question.
当西方的个人电脑革命开始改变世界时，字母表焦虑加剧了。斯坦福大学教授墨磊宁撰写了一部信息丰富且引人入胜的历史书，讲述了中国如何解决这一关键技术问题。
He observes that Chinese people, when typing on a Western-designed computer or phone, are required to operate entirely in code in order to turn keyboard letters into characters.
他观察到，中国人在使用西方设计的电脑或手机打字时，需要完全使用代码才能将键盘字母转换为汉字。
“The Chinese Computer” zeroes in on some forgotten but memorable characters. Kao Chung-Chin worked with IBM in the 1940s to develop the electric Chinese typewriter using a different four-number code for every character.
《中文打字机》关注了一些已被遗忘但值得记住的人物。高仲芹在20世纪40年代与IBM合作开发了电子中文打字机，用四个数字代表每个汉字。
Samuel Caldwell, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, spoke no Chinese but developed a system whereby each key on the QWERTY keyboard represented a brush stroke in a character; typing the first few strokes linked to a photographic storage matrix.
麻省理工学院教授塞缪尔·考德威尔不会说中文，但开发了一个系统，其中QWERTY键盘上的每个键代表汉字的一个笔画，输入前几个笔画就会链接到一个照片存储矩阵。
In the 1970s China contemplated abandoning QWERTY altogether and produced huge keyboards of characters. But from the 1980s onwards, new “structure-based” input systems flourished, such as wubi.
20世纪70年代，中国考虑完全放弃QWERTY键盘，并制作了巨大的汉字键盘。但从20世纪80年代起，新的“基于结构”的输入法开始蓬勃发展，如五笔输入法。
In those methods, each QWERTY key correlates with a different visual component of a character so, typed consecutively, they form a full character.
在这些方法中，每个QWERTY键都代表汉字中的一个不同的字形组成部分，因此连续按键，就会形成一个完整的汉字。
The lure of the Chinese market meant Western computer companies were eager for a solution. And, for all its tricksiness, the QWERTY keyboard has prevailed.
中国市场的诱惑意味着西方计算机公司热切地渴望找到一个解决方案。而且，尽管QWERTY键盘过于复杂，但它还是（在中国市场）占据了主导地位。
Of the different codes it is pinyin, which writes characters phonetically using the Roman alphabet, that has won the day. Type in a Chinese sound using Latin letters—tong, for instance—and a menu appears of the most commonly used characters with that sound.
在各种编码方式中，拼音赢得了胜利，拼音用罗马字母拼写汉字的发音。用拉丁字母输入一个中文发音——比如tong——然后就会出现一个菜单，其中包含具有该发音的最常用的一些汉字。
Mr Mullaney points out that half the world’s population uses scripts that require workarounds with a QWERTY keyboard. This is a global issue of which few Westerners are aware. China has, he writes, “saved the Western-designed computer...from its foundational limitations”.
墨磊宁指出，世界上一半人口使用的字母系统在用QWERTY键盘输入时需要变通处理。这是一个全球性的问题， 很少有西方人意识到这一点。他写道，中国“将西方设计的计算机......从其根本局限性中拯救了出来”。
Mr Mullaney’s book does not cover the current tech wars between China and America. It does, however, underline the impressive progress China has achieved in computing. For decades the country has been fighting—and typing—with one hand tied behind its back.
墨磊宁的书并未涵盖当前中美之间的科技战争。但这本书凸显了中国在计算机领域取得的令人瞩目的进展。数十年来，这个国家一直在一只手被绑在背后的情况下进行斗争和打字。
