有时你辛辛苦苦地忙了半天，仍然没有把自己的意思解释清楚。你是很清楚这件事的，可是要让听众也对它明了，就需要深入解说。那该怎么办？试试把它和听众熟悉的事情相比较：告诉他们这件事就和另一件事一样，和他们所熟悉的事一样。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.
如果讨论化学中对工业的一项贡献——催化剂。你如果告诉人们这是一种物质，就是能让别的物质改变而不会改变自己的物质。虽然简单，然而不如说它正像是一个小男孩，在校园里又跳、又打、又闹、又推别的孩子，结果自己却安然无恙，从没有遭人打过、碰过，这样不是更好吗？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.
还有个令人惊奇又有趣的例子：传教士想把《圣经》翻译成非洲附近部落的土语。其中有这样一句：“虽然你的罪恶一片鲜红，但它们终将白如白雪。”怎样翻译这一句呢？逐词逐句照翻？那些土人从来没有在二月的清晨扫除过街上积雪的经验，这样说对土人们来说是没有意义的，而且很荒谬。在他们的词汇中甚至没有“雪”这个字，他们根本不知道雪和煤炭有何差别。但他们爬上过椰子树，然后摇下几颗椰子作为午餐；因此，传教士就把“白”和他们熟悉的椰子联系起来，把那句诗改成：“虽然你的罪恶一片鲜红，但它们终将白如椰子肉。”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.
在这种情况下，很难再找到比这更好的翻译了，难道不是吗？Under the circumstances, it would be hard to improve on that, wouldn't it?
