国外媒体:印度打字机工厂的消失（在线收听）

India is well known for its legions of computer programmers, but the country also has another face as the last bastion of the typewriter. Manual typewriters stayed popular in India long after developed nations had entirely switched to the keyboard and mouse.

印度以拥有众多的程序设计师而闻名，但它也有不同的另一面：印度是打字机的最后的供应商。在发达国家完全使用键盘和鼠标代替人工打字机之后，人工打字机在印度还是很受欢迎。

As recently as the 1990s, the Mumbai plant of a company named Godrej and Boyce was turning out 50,000 typewriters a year. They were popular in a nation where reliable electricity supplies - essential for computers - are still by no means guaranteed.

早在20世纪90年代， Mumbai一家叫做Godrej and Boyce的公司每年生产5万台打字机。打字机曾在一个只能给计算机提供供电的国家（这还无法保证）十分流行。

But even in India, typewriter sales have slumped in the last ten years. Gradually, every manufacturer stopped making them, leaving only Godrej's Mumbai plant - and that switched to making fridges two years ago. And now the firm says it only has 500 typewriters left in stock.

但即使在印度，打字机的销售在过去10年中已经大幅度下滑。最近，几乎所有的工厂都停止生产大机子了，只剩下Godrej的孟买工厂——那家工厂2年前转向生产电冰箱了。现在哪家公司说只有500台的存货。

It's a far cry from the heyday of the 1950s, when India's then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru held up the humble typewriter as a symbol of the nation's independence and industrialisation.

这和20世纪50年代截然不同，那是印度的首相Jawaharlal Nehru将简陋的打字机示威国家独立和工业化的象征。

The first commercial typewriters were produced in the United States in the 1860s. The machine was then the dominant office technology for more than a century until the computer came along.

第一批打字机是美国在19世纪60年代生产的。打字机在计算机出现之前是一个多世纪的主要办公技术。