Christiane Amanpour是CNN首席国际记者，当今世界最杰出的战争报导记者之一。她报导了前苏联的解体、巴尔干战争，以及近期的达尔福尔（译注：苏丹西部一地区）种族灭绝危机和她的居住地伦敦的恐怖主义炸弹袭击。她获得过9次艾美奖。现在，沪江小编将和你一起学习这位成功人士的成功之路。

I came into journalism by way of an accident.

我成为记者纯属意外。

As a girl growing up in Iran and attending boarding school in England, I wanted to be a doctor. To get into medical school in England, however, you have to earn grades of a certain level, and I didn't. After graduating from secondary school, I sank into the limbo of young-adult angst, working at a bar and taking the morning cleanup shift to avoid dealing with drunken customers.

作为一个在伊朗长大在英国求学的女孩，我想成为一名医生。要考入英国的医学学校必须获得一定的分数，然而我没有。中学毕业后，我陷入年轻人常见的焦虑中，在酒吧工作做清晨大扫除，以避免处理那些深夜酒醉的顾客。

Then, as I was wondering what to do with my life, the revolution happened in Iran. This was 1979; I was fairly young and politically unaware, having lived a sheltered childhood, and suddenly my country rocketed to the center of world attention. My parents still lived there. Month after month, images of protests, the hostage crisis, and other tempestuous events came pouring out of my homeland.

然后，当我正在犹豫该做为我的人生做点什么好时，伊朗爆发了革命。这是1979年，我还很年轻，对政治没多少意识，经历了一个备受保护的童年，突然我的祖国以火箭般的速度成为世界关注的中心。我的父母仍旧住在那儿。月复一月，抗议情景频现，人质危机和另外一些暴乱事件蜂拥出现在我的祖国。

At the same time, my younger sister enrolled in journalism college in London, and quickly decided to withdraw. The college refused to refund her tuition. Money was tight for my family, with our assets locked up in Iran, so I took my sister's place rather than waste the investment. I figured I'd just mark time. Yet at that college on Fleet Street, I got my first taste of what this whole new world of journalism could be.

那时，我妹妹在伦敦读新闻学院，她迅速决定退学。学校拒绝退还她的学费。由于资产在伊朗被冻结，我家经济拮据，因此我顶替妹妹的学习以避免浪费学费。我认为自己只不过是在应付了事。然而，在舰队街的新闻学院里，我第一次对全新的新闻世界有了感觉。

What I remember most is being given a tape recorder and a microphone and sent out into the street to get "vox pops," or man-on-the-street interviews, asking people to describe their experience of various events. Though none of it was big news, I felt intimidated at first. I didn't know how people would react to me. I lived in fear of asking a dumb question. But I soon came to find these interviews deeply interesting, because I struck up relationships, however brief, with people. This is the bedrock of what we do as journalists -- we have to know how to talk to people, draw people out and draw their humanity out. I have always tried to focus on human stories, to get behind the headlines.

记忆最深的是带着磁带录音机和麦克风，被派到街头采集“公众舆论”，或者进行街头随机采访，要求人们描述他们对各种事件的经验。虽然其中没有一个是大新闻，起初我仍然感到害怕。我不知道人们将如何反应，一直活在会问出一个让人哑口无言问题的担心之中。但我很快发现这些访问非常有趣，我与人们建立了关系，尽管非常短暂。这是作记者的基本能力－－你必须知道如何与人们交谈，挖出他们的内心世界，挖掘出他们的人性。我一直努力关注人的故事，甚过关注头条新闻。

While I learned these basics of journalism, the first Islamic revolution in the world raged in Iran, and I was intimately involved. World events, if you're caught in the middle of them, can either flatten you or lift you up. This lifted me up.

当我学到这些新闻从业要素后，第一次伊斯兰革命在伊朗爆发，我密切地卷入其中。如果你置身世界大事之中，它或者会让你表现平平，或者会助你兴奋崛起。这次，它让我兴奋了。

Within a single semester, I decided to be a journalist. I thought the most serious thing you could do if you wanted to start a new life and be successful was to follow the playbook of all those people who go to the United States, so I enrolled at the University of Rhode Island and earned a journalism degree in three years. I worked summers at BBC Radio and conducted man-on-the-street interviews during the race riots in the Brixton area of London, building on what I had learned in school. After a brief assignment at the NBC affiliate in Providence, I took my first job at CNN in 1983 as an assistant on the international assignment desk.

仅仅一个学期，我就决定要去作一名记者。如果你想开始一种崭新的生活，或想获得成功，最该作的事情之一就是追随那些到美国发展的人们，为此，我在罗德岛大学注册就读，三年后获得了新闻学位。凭着在学校中所学，夏季我为英国广播公司（BBC）工作，在伦敦Brixton区的种族骚乱中作街头随机采访。短暂的在位于Providence（译注：罗德岛州首府）的国家广播公司（NBC） 地方分支机构任职后，1983年，我开始了自己的第一份正式工作，在美国有线新闻网络（CNN）国际事务办公室担任助手。

My "vox pops" training in London didn't prepare me for the job of journalism, though it did give me a sense of what to say to those "men on the street" in Brixton. The moment of going to that journalism college, for me, was more significant than college itself. From that little mistake that my sister made in choosing her career path, I found mine. I suppose the lesson is that you can never tell what will come up in your world that will change and shape your whole life's journey.

尽管伦敦的“公众舆论”训练使我在面对Brixton街头的人们时知道该说些什么，但它并没有为我的记者工作做好准备。对我来说，上新闻学院的那一刻远比学院生活本身更有意义。从妹妹在选择职业道路上犯的小错误中，我找到自己的职业。由此获得的经验是，你永远无法知道未来将会有什么闯进你的世界，改变、甚至重塑你整个的人生。

People often ask me what gives me the courage to venture into war zones and disaster areas to get a story. I believe many experiences shape a person. One of mine was riding horses competitively from age five. My teacher, a colonel in the Iranian army, was very tough -- there was no mollycoddling. If I fell off or got kicked in the stomach, he put me right back on the horse. That teaches you fortitude. I also had several teachers -- a biology teacher in secondary school, for example, and a Shakespeare professor in college -- who infected me with their love of learning these difficult, complex subjects.

人们常常问我，是什么给了我勇气到战争和灾难区去冒险采集新闻。我相信很多经历塑造了一个人，而我的经历之一是从五岁开始的竞技骑马。当时的骑术老师是一名伊朗军队的团长，他非常严厉－－不允许弱者存在。如果我从马背跌落或者被马踢到了胃，他也会把我放回到马背上去。这些经历教会了我坚韧不拔。还有另外几位老师，如中学的生物老师、大学里的一位莎士比亚教授－－他们用他们的爱，影响我去学习那些困难而复杂的学科。

As a mother, sometimes I'm alarmed, really alarmed, at how much our children learn from us -- everything from the way we talk to how we act and think. Our influence, however subliminal, forms the basic scaffolding of who they will become. Teachers, too, hold that subtle, powerful sway, though many don't get to see the full result of their contributions.

作为一位母亲，我对孩子们能在我这儿学到什么保持警觉，真正的警觉－－对任何事情，从说话的方式到我们的行为和思想。我们的影响虽然是潜意识的，却是孩子将来会成为什么样子的基础。老师们同样拥有微妙的、有力的影响，虽然许多人看不到他们所作贡献的全部结果。

Everywhere I go in the underdeveloped world, when I ask people what they want to be, they say "a teacher" or "a doctor" -- the two most respected professions. When I go into classrooms, whether they're ramshackle, makeshift classes in some slum in a city or a nice rural location, the kids are just wide eyed. All they want is knowledge and information. I really regret that in our first world, where we have the money and ability, we treat teachers like third-class citizens and pay them like fifth-class citizens.

每到当我去到不发达世界，问起人们想成为什么样的人时，他们的回答总是“老师”或者“医生”，两个最受尊重的职业。我走进教室－－无论是在某座城市贫民窟里摇摇欲坠、临时拼凑的教室，还是在一间漂亮的乡村教室，都会看到孩子们张大着充满渴望的眼睛，期待知识和信息。真的很遗憾，在我们这样的第一世界里，不缺钱又有足够的能力，可我们对待老师仍然象对待三等公民，只付出了五等的薪水。

For me, the combination of my early experiences equipped me with determination and a capacity to see the humanity in people from far-flung places, even in the worst of circumstances. So, when my professors sent me out with that microphone, and when the Iranian revolution drew me to observe critical events around the globe, I was ready to seize the opportunity.

对我来说，早期的经历使我具备了决断力，和一种即使是在最糟糕的环境中也能看清广泛人性的能力。因此，当我的教授给我麦克风派我走上街头，当伊斯兰革命吸引我观察全球危机事件时，我已作好了准备，去迎接机会的到来。

Christiane Amanpour在战争报导之外：

视频：The Charlie Rose Show
视频：The Colbert Report
视频：The Daily Show
视频：The Oprah Winfrey Show
视频：个人小传 The Hour (加拿大广播公司)
“911如何改变了新闻业 ”（PBS报导战争中的美国：口述历史）
个人小传 (维基百科)

原文：Learning Curves: Christiane Amanpour
作者：Christiane Amanpour
译者：Liaoqihao

审校：danny