The world is full of wonderful things. Although the word "Kaleidoscopic" is difficult to describe, it also conveys some meaning. "Thousands" means huge and inexhaustible quantity; "flowers" are of all shapes and colors and have different interests; "tubes" are the vision of viewing the world.Da Vinci said it well: Painting is "teaching people how to see".I think the original intention of the "Kaleidoscopic" translation series is also the same. We live in an era of globalization.As early as 1827, Goethe predicted the arrival of the era of "world literature"; later, Marx further confirmed the integration of the world, from the formation of the world market to the "spiritual products of all nations becoming public property", he strongly argued "National one-sidedness and limitations are becoming increasingly impossible".This topic has been very popular recently in Western intellectual circles.Our regional life and global connections couldn't be more evident.The theme of the Greenpeace movement - "Think globally, act locally" - expresses the true meaning of the globalization process. In 1990, geographer David Harvey pointed out in his popular book "Conditions of Postmodernity" that if the world in 1500 was still a huge planet, then from the speed of a carriage to the speed of a jet, The Earth has shrunk significantly.He described this process of globalization and modernization as "the condensation of time and space". "Condensation" reflects the shortening of distances in time and space, but it reveals such profound changes in the way we understand the world that we have to change (sometimes in radical ways) the way we picture the world .Just as the fashionable term "global village" (McLuhan) shows, we live in a globalized era where multiple cultures coexist. The pre-modern legacy of "ageing and dying" is gone forever, and interactive coexistence is the rule of the game in the real world.Back then, our ancestors looked at the world with cold eyes, but now, the world is becoming a part of our lives. “Distant events invade our daily life”(Giddens).Globalization has condensed the whole world into a whole.The outside world is really wonderful, and the launch of the "Kaleidoscope" translation collection is nothing more than another bridge connecting us with the world.

Recently, the European Union (EU) is implementing an ambitious plan, also called "Kaleidoscopic Project", which aims to encourage the preservation of the cultural heritage and characteristics of various nations and promote exchanges and understanding among different cultures.Yilin Publishing House has ingeniously conceived and planned this set of "Kaleidoscopic" translation collections. I don't know whether it is a coincidence of "heroes see the same thing" or a deliberate practice. It reflects a keen cultural awareness and deep communication rationality. .The ancients said: Know yourself and know your enemy.It's even more interesting to reverse the statement: know yourself and your enemy.In other words, understanding the world leads to a deeper understanding of yourself.On the day of Zhuangzi, Hebo traveled eastward along the river to the North Sea, and only then did he know the size of the four seas. "Kaleidoscope" is to allow us to experience more deeply the vastness of the world, the richness of its culture, the complexity of various ideas, the disparity of various successes, and the various possibilities of the future.

We are not only facing an era of globalization, but also an era of media culture.In other words, globalization is achieved through medialization.Electronic media and images pose a huge "threat" to traditional print culture.Someone made a somewhat sensational claim: digital books will replace traditional printed books.If books are indeed gone, the prospect is a bit depressing indeed.It is recently heard that a symposium on library digitization has been held in the United States, and the prediction of the future really makes people feel a little uneasy amid the excitement.In addition, recently it has become a major cultural study, and "visual culture" is gaining momentum, so some people predict that the visual culture represented by images will replace the text-based printing culture.This sounds unavoidably discouraging and suspicious. The publishing performance of some titles in the "Kaleidoscope" translation series has shown that the vitality of books is very tenacious, and the joy of reading is enduring.Understanding the world from words has a lot of meaning and fun, and images can never replace words.So I think that the "Kaleidoscope" translation collection not only advances our understanding of the world, but also further enhances our reading pleasure, because it opens up a path for us to escape in the "forest of good books".In an era where saving time and improving efficiency are regarded as the standard, and in an era where good and bad books are mixed, it has indeed become an annoying problem to use limited time to read good books.I believe that the "Kaleidoscopic" series of carefully selected translations must be high-quality products, which can be harvested and learned from reading.

It is for sequence.