A simple analogy can be used to get a better grasp on how protein synthesis works.

Imagine that you have a cookbook (DNA) that has all of the recipes in the world in it. This would be a very valuable and large book. It would be kept in a special room in the house called the den (nucleus) and never taken out of that protected space. When you need to have a particular cookie (protein), you need to go into the den and get a copy of the recipe that you can work from (a transcription).

So you go into the den with a 3x5 card and look up the recipe. You need to make chocolate chip cookies, so you ignore a recipe for oatmeal cookies (non-coding strand). Transcription begins as you start to rewrite the recipe onto the 3x5 card (mRNA). This creates a disposable and transportable copy of the valuable information.

Once you move out of the den you go into the kitchen (cytosol) where you place the 3x5 card on a counter just under the mixing bowl (ribosome). The process of translation now has begun. Your hands (tRNA) grab the ingredients (amino acids) and bring them to the bowl in the specified order listed on the recipe card (mRNA).