Thank you Oxford, and thank you Oxford Union.
感谢牛津大学,感谢牛津大学联合会。
It is truly an honor and a privilege to be here today and that you have afforded me this opportunity to speak to you.
今天有机会到此为各位做演讲,我感到无比荣幸。
I must confess, I am somewhat mystified as to why you are here. Because there won't be any singing, any hip-shaking. What so ever.
坦白地说,对于大家的到来我感到有些困惑,因为今天在此,我既不唱歌,而且这里也没有热舞。
So, how do I, a girl from Barranquilla, Colombia come to occupy the same stage as Newton and Churchill. Lord knows I'm no Mother Teresa, but here I am, nonetheless.
那么,我,一个来自哥伦比亚巴兰基利亚小城的女孩儿,怎么会站到了牛顿和丘吉尔曾经站过的讲台上?众所周知,我不是特蕾莎修女,但是不管怎样,我今天站在了这里。
I realize that one point of view from which I can depart is that of an artist. After all, it is who I am. We artists depend on our imaginations.
我知道我可以从艺人的视角来进行演讲,毕竟我就是一个艺人。我们这些艺人靠的是想象力。
When I first learned I was coming, I thought about the past and I imagined the future. From your minds, ideas will sprout that will give new shape to the world. I cannot help but fast-forward to what the world will be like in 50 years. What will be happening? Who will we be? What challenges can we overcome? How will we live?
在我刚刚得知自己要来这里的时候,我追忆过去,畅想未来。你们的脑海中将迸出思想的火花,这些火花将给世界带来新的变化。我不禁立刻想到半个世纪后这个世界的样子。半个世纪后,会发生什么事情呢?我们会是谁呢?我们会战胜哪些挑战呢?我们怎么生活呢?
I have a fantasy about this future that I want to share with you today.
在此我想和在座的各位一起分享我对未来的幻想。
Let me put it this way, if civilization were a car, we would have been cruising at 20 miles per hour for millions of years only to hit light speed in the last hundred.
让我这么说吧,如果把文明比作一辆汽车,那么数百万年以来我们一直在以每小时20英里的速度平稳行驶,但却在最近的几百年里达到了光速。
So I wonder what make us accelerate so quickly recently and how can we continue this pace? There is only one explanation to me, and that's the democratization of education.
是什么让我们的文明在最近这些年迅猛发展,我们又该如何保持这个速度呢?在我看来答案只有一个:教育的民主化。