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At Fisher-Price headquarters, it was hard not to feel like an extraordinary amount of time, effort and alkaline batteries – not to mention a few synapses – were being wasted to make Rube Goldberg machines for the alphabet song.
在费雪总部，人们很难不觉得，为了制作鲁布·戈德堡字母歌机器，浪费了大量的时间、精力以及碱性电池，更不用说浪费掉的几个神经突触了。
On the day I visited, a researcher in a black surgical mask was sliding an eye-tracking device over the head of an 18-month-old boy.
在我到访的那天，一名戴着外科黑口罩的研究人员正往一个18个月大的男孩头上佩戴眼球追踪仪。
We were in a part of Fisher-Price called the Play Lab, where experts in early childhood education use new technologies, such as emotion-analysing “face reader” software, to help design toys that meet kids’ “physical, cognitive, social and emotional development needs”.
我们来到了费雪公司的“游戏实验室”，在这里，幼儿教育专家利用如情绪分析“面部解读器”软件等新技术，帮助设计满足儿童“身体、认知、社交和情感发展需求”的玩具。
(One of the company’s recent slogans was “Best Possible Start”, which seems like a good way to inject the urgency of the first three years directly into insecure parents’ ready veins.)
(该公司最近的口号之一是“最佳起步”，这似乎是一种很好的方式，可以将前三年的紧迫感直接注入缺乏安全感的父母的血液中。)
Once the eye tracker had been fitted, the little boy was ready to begin his encounter with the Smooth Moves Sloth, an eight-inch-high electronic light-and-noise box in the Linkimals line.
一旦安装好眼动追踪器，这名小男孩就准备好要开始与“音乐树懒”相遇了。“音乐树懒”是“联萌”系列中的一个8英寸高的电子光噪音箱。
Designed to seize children’s attention with its wide, vacantly smiling eyes and hypnotically swaying head, the Sloth has the vibe of a merrily lobotomised nursery school teacher.
“树懒”大大的眼睛带着茫然笑意，脑袋催眠般地摇摆着，“树懒”的设计就是用这样的形象吸引孩子们的注意，给人营造一种快乐且迟钝的幼儿园老师的感觉。
An intern instigated one of the Sloth’s routines by pressing a button on its foot, and it jolted into action.
一名实习生按下“树懒”脚上的一个按钮，引发了它的常规动作，开始摇晃着动起来。
“Hey, what’s up?” the creature asked, sounding like a California college stoner transported to the front of a classroom. “Hahaha. Let’s sing!”
“嘿，怎么了?” 树懒”那家伙问道，听起来就像一个加州大学的瘾君子被带到教室前面。“哈哈哈。让我们一起唱吧!”
A look of alarm gripped the toddler and he backed away from the toy, not taking his eyes off it.
这名幼儿露出惊恐的神色，他后退着远离玩具，眼睛直勾勾盯着它。
Such retreats are typical of young mammals when they encounter novel objects in their environment; they must assess the unknown entity for danger before they can contemplate playing with it.
当幼儿在环境中遇到新事物时，这种撤退很典型; 他们必须评估未知实体的危险性，然后才能考虑与它玩耍。
One of the things that the Play Lab researchers look for are distinct “play patterns”, an industry-wide term of art for the ways toys engage children: does it encourage a child to crawl on the floor, allow kids to sort shapes and stack blocks?
游戏实验室的研究人员寻求的是独特的“游戏模式”，这是整个玩具行业如何吸引孩子的专门术语: 它是否鼓励孩子在地板上爬行，允许孩子进行形状分类和堆积木?
Fisher-Price claims the Sloth is proven to “reinforce early learning connections in little brains” and teaches “ABCs & 123s, Opposites & Games”.
费雪声称，“树懒”被证明可以“加强幼儿大脑的早期学习联系”，并教授“字母数字与反义词游戏”。
The little boy advanced toward the Sloth and then withdrew again, curious, but vigilant.
小男孩向“树懒”走去，然后又退了回去，他虽然很好奇，但也很警惕。
He might have been learning something, but it was not, in that moment, his ABCs.
他可能学到了一些东西，但在那一刻，学到的并非是ABC字母。
