CNN News: 造福零售業(yè)的條形碼

When it comes to retail products, what does "UPC" stand for?
當涉及到零售產(chǎn)品時，“UPC”代表什么?
Unique Product Code, Universal Product Code, Unique Price Code, or Universal Product Co-op?
獨特產(chǎn)品代碼？通用產(chǎn)品代碼？獨特價格代碼？還是通用產(chǎn)品合作社?
UPC stands for Universal Product Code, the standard barcode printed on the stuff we buy.
UPC代表通用產(chǎn)品代碼，即印在我們所購買商品上的標準條形碼。
Only the non-millennial and maybe some early millennial members of our audience will remember using these, the walkman, floppy disks and, of course, VHS. You needed something to tape world premiere music videos. All of these things were inventions of the 1970s. And while today, their value is probably more nostalgic than usual, there are some devices of the disco era that are still helping us every day.
相信我們的觀眾朋友中只有非千禧一代，或者某些早期的千禧一代還會記得使用這些東西——隨身聽、軟盤，當然還有錄像帶。你需要一些東西來錄下全球首發(fā)的音樂錄影帶。所有這些都是上世紀70年代的發(fā)明。然而如今它們的價值可能主要體現(xiàn)在懷舊上，但仍有一些迪斯科時代的設(shè)備時至今日仍在日常生活中被廣泛使用。
On June 26, 1974, a pack of Juicy Fruit gum made history when it was the first item ever to be scanned via a state-of-the-art technology: the barcode.
1974年6月26日，一盒Juicy Fruit牌的口香糖創(chuàng)造了歷史。它是有史以來首個通過當時最先進的技術(shù)——條形碼進行掃描的商品。
And now, more than 40 years later, as many as 5 billion barcodes are scanned every day across the world.
而現(xiàn)在，40多年后的今天，全世界每天都有多達50億的條形碼被掃描。
The code itself, you know, those black lines of varying width on the label, was inspired by Morse code. But the holy smokes component of the innovation was how it was scanned by lasers.
條形碼——標簽上那些寬度不同的黑線，是受到摩爾斯電碼的啟發(fā)發(fā)明的。但這一發(fā)明的神圣之處卻是它是如何被激光掃描的。
Lasers had been the stuff of nerd fantasies until the early 1960s, when the Hughes Aircraft Company unveiled the first one at a press conference.
以前激光一直是書呆子幻想中的素材，直到1960年代早期，休斯飛機公司在一次新聞發(fā)布會上首次將其公開。
A Los Angeles newspaper reported the story underneath the headline, "LA man discovers science fiction death ray."
洛杉磯一家報紙報道了這一事件，標題是“洛杉磯發(fā)現(xiàn)了科幻中的死亡射線。”
But the fact of the matter is, no one really knew what to do with that new technology until that June morning in 1974 when a pack of Juicy Fruit gum in Ohio changed the world.
但事實是，沒有人知道到底該如何利用它，直到1974年6月的一個早晨，俄亥俄州的一盒Juicy Fruit口香糖改變了世界，人們才真正了解該怎樣運用這項新技術(shù)。
Today, barcodes are the unsung heroes that make everything from shipping to boarding an airplane, to keeping track of medication possible.
今天，條形碼是從航運到空運的所有物品上必不可少的、是使得追蹤藥物成為可能的無名英雄。
But the biggest beneficiary is retail. Think about a grocery store from yesteryear. Every individual item had to be marked with its price, and the cashier had to manually input it into the register.
但最大的受益者是零售業(yè)。想想前不久的雜貨店吧，那時每個單獨的商品都必須標明價格，而收銀員必須手動將其輸入到寄存器中。
So, thanks to the barcode, you`re waiting in the checkout line a whole lot less and the stores themselves benefited big time. The barcodes allow them to keep accurate, real-time inventory. That`s a major advance in efficiency, even if it cost some grocery staff their jobs.
所以，多虧了條形碼，收銀臺排隊的人才少了很多，商店本身也從中受益良多。條形碼保證了商品信息的準確性，使他們了解到商品的實時庫存。雖然這讓一些雜貨店的員工丟了工作，但它卻為行業(yè)效率帶來了極大的進步。