英语科幻电影常见科技词汇

2017-03-14

Time travel

时空旅行

While time travel has been considered since as early as The Mahabharata, H. G. Wells gave the English language much-used terminology on the subject. In 1894 Wells coined terms related to time travel such as time travelling and time traveller in his story with the heading "Time Travelling: Possibility or Paradox."

虽然时空旅行的想法在《摩呵婆罗多》中就出现过，但是，将这个术语带入英语的是H·G·威尔斯。1894年，威尔斯在名为《时空旅行：可能还是悖论》的故事中创造了时空旅行、时空旅行者等相关词语。

Robotics

机器人学

While the noun robotics is commonplace today, it wasn't back in the 1941 when sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov coined the term in a short story published in Astounding Science Fiction. It took another 20 years before the term really took off, and by the 1980s, robotics had firmly planted itself in the English language.

虽然今天听起来很常见，但机器人学这个名词其实是1941年才出现的，当时科幻作家艾萨克·阿西莫夫在《Astounding Science Fiction》上发表的一篇短篇小说中创造了这个词。过了20年它才真正被接受，到1980年代，机器人学这个词终于进入英语(课程)语言中。

Zero g

零重力

Zero gravity was coined by Arthur C. Clarke in Sands of Mars, his first science-fiction novel. A year later, he coined the term zero g, where g is short for "gravity," in his novel Islands in the Sky. This concept of zero g became official terminology of astronauts as the Space Race accelerated in the 1960s, and today, it's viewed more as a science term than a sci-fi term.

亚瑟·C·克拉克在他的首部科幻小说《火星之沙》之中创造了零重力这个词。一年后，他又在小说《空中列岛》中创造了零重力的缩写Zero g。1960年代，太空竞赛加速，零重力的概念成为了宇航员的官方术语。如今，它更多地被看作是科学术语而非科幻术语了。

Droid

类人机器人

Droid, or a robot in human-like form, is a shortened form of android which was used as early as the 1700s. Droid was first published in the 1950s in magazines like If that printed sci-fi short stories. The 1977 film franchise Star Wars brought droid into mainstream usage.

Droid是android的简称，意为类人机器人。Android一词早在18世纪就有，droid则是1950年代才在《If》等刊登科幻小说的杂志上出现。1977年的《星球大战》电影系列使类人机器人这个词开始被大量使用。

Warp speed

翘曲速度

If you're traveling in a spacecraft at a speed faster than light, you're moving at warp speed. The word warp comes from the Old English wearp which refers to threads running over fabric. The first known usage of warp in relation to speed was in a 1968 Star Trek script, "All Our Yesterdays."

如果你在宇宙飞船里以超光速飞行，你就是以翘曲速度在前进。Warp一词源自古英语wearp，指织物上的线。Warp首次表达跟速度相关的用法是在1968年的《星际迷航：原初》剧本中。

Alien

外星人

Alien comes to English from the Latin alienus meaning "belonging to another." When it first entered English in the 1300s, it referred to an outsider, someone born in another country, or someone who is unfamiliar. It was not until the late 1920s that alien took on its sci-fi meaning of "an intelligent being from another planet." Similarly, when earthling first entered English in the late-1500s, it meant someone who lived on earth, not in heaven. Only in the mid-1800s did it take on the sci-fi meaning of a person who is not an alien.

Alien一词源自拉丁语的alienus，意为“属于另一个的”。14世纪进入英语时，alien指的是外来者、生于其他国家的人或不熟悉的人。直到1920年代，alien才有了科幻含义“外星人”。同样，当earthling一词最早进入英语时，指的是地上的人，而非天堂的人。19世纪中期，它才有了科幻含义“地球人”。

Nanotechnology

纳米技术

Nanites, or tiny robots built on the small scale, were a concept first realized in science fiction and later researched by scientists in the hopes of making these minute robots a reality. Sometimes called nanomachines, nanorobots, or nanobots, these robots will one day have many real-life applications. Perhaps one of the first science fiction writers to imagine nanotechnology was Nikolai Leskov, whose 1881 story described imperceptible robots, requiring 5,000,000 times magnification to be seen.

纳米人，或小尺寸微型机器人的概念最早出现在科幻小说中，后来被科学家所研究，希望能将这一概念变为现实。这种机器人有时也被称作nanomachines、nanorobots或nanobots，未来它们将在生活中有很多应用。首次畅想纳米技术的科幻作家可能是尼古拉·列斯克夫，他在1881年的一个故事中曾描述过这种难以察觉的机器人，需要放大500万倍才能看见。

Clone

克隆

When clone first entered English in 1903, it was used in the context of botany. It comes from the Greek klon meaning "a twig" and is related to klados meaning "offshoot of a plant." Later, clone took on the sci-fi sense of "artificially duplicated person" thanks to Alvin Toffler's 1970 book Future Shock.

克隆一词首次进入英语是在1903年，当时是植物用语，源自希腊语的klon，意思是“嫩枝”，它还和klados有关，这个词的意思是“一棵植物的分支”。后来，阿尔文·托夫勒在1970年出版的《未来的冲击》中赋予了它科幻含义，指“复制人类”。

Cyberpunk

赛博朋克

The second half of the 20th century saw the birth of the cyberpunk sci-fi subgenre. Often set in industrial dystopias, the cyberpunk genre features plots related to computing, hackers, and large corrupt corporations. Perhaps the earliest recorded use of the term was in Bruce Bethke's 1983 story "Cyberpunk."

20世纪下半叶出现了科幻小说亚类赛博朋克。这类作品一般背景设定为工业化的反乌托邦，情节涉及计算、黑客、大型贪污公司等。这个词有记录的最早使用出自布鲁斯·贝斯克1983年的作品《赛博朋克》中。

Virus

病毒

Science fiction writers of the cyberpunk persuasion introduced the world to a new sense of virus: the computer virus. This sense of virus appears in a short story by Gregory Benford published in 1970 in which a malevolent computer program called VIRUS infects computers via their modem connections. Within five years David Gerrold, Michael Crichton, and John Brunner had all published sci-fi novels featuring computer viruses, and from there, computers along with the viruses that aim to corrupt them became part of language and life beyond science fiction.

赛博朋克派系的科幻作家赋予了病毒一词新的含义：计算机病毒。杰格瑞·班福德1970年发表的短篇小说中出现了这种病毒。书中，一个名为VIRUS的恶意程序通过调制解调器感染了电脑。不到五年，大卫·杰洛德、迈克尔·克莱顿、约翰·布鲁勒尔都发表了有关电脑病毒的科幻小说。从此以后，携带病毒的计算机就不单存在于科幻小说中了，它成为了我们语言和生活的一部分。