实战口语情景对话 第817期:Touchy Topics 敏感话题

Greg: Hi, Todd.
格雷格：你好，托德。

Todd: Hey, Greg.
托德：嗨，格雷格。

Greg: Hey, thanks a lot for interviewing me and letting, I don't know, the world know about my book.
格雷格：嘿，非常谢谢你采访我，让世界了解我的书。

Todd: No, problem. It's a good book.
托德：不客气。这是本好书。

Greg: Yeah, I've noticed you don't have any topics like these on your web site. Why not?
格雷格：嗯，我注意到，你的网站上没有这种话题。这是为什么？

Todd: Right. I don't have too many controversial topics. There's actually technical reasons. One is it just takes too long for people to talk about a controversial topic, so for example if you really want to get into controversy, you know, it leads to long conversation and people expressing their view and arguing and the way that the audio is set up on elllo, it's kind of short. I try to keep it under three minutes, so that's one reason. But actually the main reason is because, you know, when people come in, I don't know them a lot of the times I don't know the speakers very well and so they're not really comfortable arguing with me or arguing with somebody else they don't know about something that's controversial, so we tend to not do that.
托德：对。我们网站上没有太多争议话题。这其实是技术原因。其中一个原因是，讨论争议话题需要很长时间，如果要讨论争议问题，那就会进行很长时间的对话，人们要表达他们的观点和主张，可是ello网站上的音频都很短。我尽量将每期节目的时长控制在3分钟以内，这是其中一个原因。不过主要原因是，大多数时候我不认识录制节目的嘉宾，我不太了解他们，所以如果他们和我或是其他他们不认识的嘉宾就争议话题进行辩论的话，他们可能会感觉不舒服，所以我们尽量不这么做。

Greg: OK, alright, it's something you might want to think about. I mean, I think there are lot of people in the world who are really interested in controversial topics.
格雷格：好，这可能是你要思考的事情。我的意思是，世界上有很多人对争议话题感兴趣。

Todd: Well, I think there are some, like with you we talked about some like income disparity and medical issues, and I'm comfortable talking about that but I am not comfortable talking about let's say homosexuality, religious beliefs, abortion, politics. Things like that I just don't feel comfortable doing.
托德：我和你谈论了收入差距和医疗问题，我觉得谈论这种话题还是很自在的，可是我不想谈论同性恋问题、宗教信仰、堕胎、政治问题。谈话这些话题我会感觉不自在。

Greg: OK, it's your site: your right to do whatever you want, but I just think maybe ... maybe some of your listeners would appreciate that and maybe you could have ... my suggestion is that you have a little one page, controversial page, or something. Just, you know, try it out, and if you get a lot of good reaction, you might want to continue and if it doesn't work out stop it.
格雷格：好，这是你的网站，你有权利做你想做的事，不过我认为也许……也许一些听众会希望你……我的建议是，增设一个争议问题网页。你可以试试，如果良好的反应很多的话，你可以继续做下去，如果反应不好，那就可以关掉这个网页。

Todd: Well, actually, I'll give you an example of one I did recently. I had a woman come in, Stella, she did a great job on the videos, and one of her videos was about an usual sport in your country and hers was on cock fighting, and she explained cock fighting, or hen fighting, in Kenya, and right off the bat I knew that was going to be a problem because that's illegal in some countries and some people — animal activists — would be offended, but on the other hand, it's her culture and I don't feel comfortable saying — you know — what's right or what's wrong about someone else's culture so I just ended up not putting it on just because I didn't want to have to take a side. You know, I think you can kind of see the problem, that sometimes you can put stuff up and it's so easy to alienate maybe a small portion of your audience and I just don't want to do that. You know, I don't have a side about the issue but I just don't want to alienate people. I don't want people on one side of an issue to feel upset so I just play it safe, and I don't talk about it.
托德：我给你讲一个例子吧，是我最近录的一期节目。那期节目请的是一个女嘉宾史黛拉，她做了很多很棒的视频，其中一个视频是她们国家的常见运动，她讲的是斗鸡，她在视频里解释了肯尼亚的斗鸡运动，我马上就意识到这个话题可能有问题，因为这项运动在一些国家是非法的，动物保护者可能会感到很生气，不过另一方面，这是她的文化，我不太好去评价其他人的文化是对还是错，所以最后我没有把这期节目放在网站上，因为我不想偏袒哪一方。你看，像这样的问题很容易会使一小部分听众疏远网站，我不想这样。我在这个问题上不支持任何一个观点，我只是不想让听众疏远我的网站。我不想让在这个问题上持某个观点的听众感觉苦恼，所以我要谨慎行事，不去讨论这个问题。

Greg: OK, well, you seem to have a lot of listeners who are very happy so don't worry about changing it.
格雷格：好，看起来你的很多听众都很开心，不要担心改变。

Todd: I hope so. I hope so.
托德：希望如此，希望如此。