比尔·盖茨在哈佛大学毕业典礼的演讲
Graduation Speech
比尔·盖茨
By Bill Gates
尊敬的博克校长，鲁丹斯汀前校长，即将上任的福斯特校长，哈佛集团的各位成员，监管理事会的各位理事，各位老师，各位家长，各位同学：
President Bok, former President Rudenstine, incoming President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, parents, and especially, the graduates:
有一句话我等了30年，现在终于可以说了：“老爸，我总是跟你说，我会回来拿到我的学位的！”
I’ve been waiting more than 30 years to say this, “Dad, I always told you I’d come back and get my degree.”
我要感谢哈佛大学在这个时候给我这个荣誉。明年，我就要换工作了（注：指从微软公司退休）……我终于可以在简历上写我有一个本科学位，这真是不错啊。
I want to thank Harvard for this timely honor. I’ll be changing my job next year…and it will be nice to finally have a college degree on my resume.
我为今天在座的各位同学感到高兴，你们拿到学位可比我简单多了。哈佛的校报称我是“哈佛大学历史上最成功的辍学生”。我想这大概使我有资格代表我这一类学生发言……在所有的失败者里，我做得最好。
I applaud the graduates today for taking a much more direct route to your degrees. For my part, I’m just happy that the Crimson has called me “Harvard’s most successful dropout.” I guess that makes me valedictorian of my own special class… I did the best of everyone who failed.
但是，我还要提醒大家，我使得斯蒂夫·鲍莫（注：微软总经理）也从哈佛商学院退学了。因此，我是个有着恶劣影响力的人。这就是为什么我被邀请来在你们的毕业典礼上演讲。如果我在你们入学欢迎仪式上演讲，那么能够坚持到今天在这里毕业的人也许会少得多吧。
But I also want to be recognized as the guy who got Steve Ballmer to drop out of business school. I’m a bad influence. That’s why I was invited to speak at your graduation. If I had spoken at your orientation, fewer of you might be here today.
对我来说，哈佛的求学经历是一段非凡的经历。校园生活很有趣，我常去旁听我没选修的课。哈佛的宿舍生活也棒极了，我在拉德克利夫过着逍遥自在的日子。每天我的寝室里总有很多人一直待到半夜，讨论着各种事情。因为每个人都知道我从不考虑第二天早起。这使得我变成了校园里那些不安分学生的头头，我们互相黏在一起，做出一种拒绝所有正常学生的姿态。
Harvard was just a phenomenal experience for me. Academic life was fascinating. I used to sit in on lots of classes I hadn’t even signed up for. And dorm life was terrific. I lived up at Radcliffe, in Currier House. There were always lots of people in my dorm room late at night discussing things, because everyone knew I didn’t worry about getting up in the morning. That’s how I came to be the leader of the anti-social group. We clung to each other as a way of validating our rejection of all those social people.
拉德克利夫是个过日子的好地方。那里的女生比男生多，而且大多数男生都是理工科的。这种状况为我创造了最好的机会，你们是否明白我的意思。可惜的是，我正是在这里学到了人生中悲伤的一课：机会大，并不保证你就会成功。
Radcliffe was a great place to live. There were more women up there, and most of the guys were science-math types. That combination offered me the best odds, if you know what I mean. This is where I learned the sad lesson that improving your odds doesn’t guarantee success.
我在哈佛最难忘的回忆之一，发生在1975年1月。那时，我从宿舍楼里给位于阿尔布开克的一家公司打了一个电话，那家公司已经在着手制造世界上第一台个人电脑。我提出想向他们出售软件。
One of my biggest memories of Harvard came in January 1975, when I made a call from Currier House to a company in Albuquerque that had begun making the world’s first personal computers. I offered to sell them software.
我很担心，他们会发觉我只是一个住在宿舍的学生，从而挂断电话。但是他们却说：“我们还没准备好，一个月后你再来找我们吧。”这是个好消息，因为那时软件还根本没有写出来呢。就是从那个时候起，我夜以继日地在这个小小的课外项目上工作，这标志了我接受大学教育的结束，以及通往微软公司的不平凡的旅程的开始。
I worried that they would realize I was just a student in a dorm and hang up on me. Instead they said, “We’re not quite ready, come see us in a month,” which was a good thing, because we hadn’t written the software yet. From that moment, I worked day and night on this little extra credit project that marked the end of my college education and the beginning of a remarkable journey with Microsoft.
不管怎样，我对哈佛的回忆主要都与充沛的精力和智力活动有关。哈佛的生活令人愉快，也令人感到有压力，有时甚至会感到泄气，但永远充满了挑战性。生活在哈佛是一种吸引人的特殊待遇……虽然我离开得比较早，但是我在这里的经历、在这里结识的朋友以及在这里发展起来的一些想法，永远地改变了我。
What I remember above all about Harvard was being in the midst of so much energy and intelligence. It could be exhilarating, intimidating, sometimes even discouraging, but always challenging. It was an amazing privilege…and though I left early, I was transformed by my years at Harvard, the friendships I made, and the ideas I worked on.
但是，如果现在严肃地回忆起来，我确实有一个真正的遗憾。
But taking a serious look back, I do have one big regret.
我离开哈佛的时候，根本没有意识到这个世界是多么的不公正。人类在健康、财富和机遇上的差异大得惊人，它们使得无数的人们被迫生活在绝望之中。
I left Harvard with no real awareness of the awful inequities in the world—the appalling disparities of health, and wealth, and opportunity that condemn millions of people to lives of despair.
我离开校园的时候，根本不知道在这个国家里有许多的年轻人无法获得接受教育的机会。我也不知道发展中国家里有无数的人们生活在无法形容的贫穷和疾病之中。
I left campus knowing little about the millions of young people cheated out of educational opportunities here in this country. And I knew nothing about the millions of people living in unspeakable poverty and disease in developing countries.
在座的各位同学，你们是在与我不同的时代来到哈佛的。你们比以前的学生，更多地了解世界是怎样的不公正。在你们的哈佛求学过程中，我希望你们已经有机会思考过一个问题，那就是在这个科技飞速发展的时代——我们怎样做才能最终应对这种不公正，以及我们怎样来解决这个问题。为了讨论的方便，请设想一下，假如你每个星期可以捐献一些时间、每个月可以捐献一些钱给一项事业——你希望这些时间和金钱，可以用到对拯救生命和改善人类生活有最大作用的地方。你会选择用到什么地方？
You graduates came to Harvard at a different time. You know more about the world’s inequities than the classes that came before. In your years here, I hope you’ve had a chance to think about how—in this age of accelerating technology—we can finally take on these inequities, and we can solve them. Imagine, just for the sake of discussion, that you had a few hours a week and a few dollars a month to donate to a cause—and you wanted to spend that time and money where it would have the greatest impact in saving and improving lives. Where would you spend it?
对梅琳达（注：盖茨的妻子）和我来说，我们面临同样的难题：我们如何能将我们拥有的资源发挥出最大的作用。
For Melinda and for me, the challenge is the same: how can we do the most good for the greatest number with the resources we have.
在对这个问题的讨论过程中，梅琳达和我读到了一篇文章，上面说在那些贫穷的国家，每年有许多儿童死于那些在美国早已不成问题的疾病。麻疹、疟疾、肺炎、乙型肝炎、黄热病，还有一种以前我从未听说过的轮状病毒，这些疾病每年导致50万儿童死亡，但是在美国一例死亡病例也没有。
During our discussions on this question, Melinda and I read an article about the millions of children who were dying every year in poor countries from diseases that we had long ago made harmless in this country. Measles, malaria, pneumonia, hepatitis B, yellow fever. One disease I had never even heard of, rotavirus, was killing half a million kids each year , none of them in the United States.
我们被震惊了。我们假设，如果几百万儿童正在死亡线上挣扎，而且他们是可以被挽救的，那么世界理应将用药物拯救他们作为头等大事。但是事实并非如此。那些价格还不到一美元的救命的药剂，并没有送到他们的手中。
