选自2018年7月14日《经济学人》文章原标题为：

A Chinese music-video app is making WeChat sweat

次标题为：

Tik  Tok  has  become  the  world’s  most  downloaded  i Phone  app,  barring games.

• make sb. sweat= make sb. worry
  

• barring= except for

A PUBLIC spat between two warring and wildly popular Chinese apps has had the feel of a teenage dance-off. “Sorry, Douyin Fans”, ran an article from the short-video app on its WeChat account, in which it accused the mobile-messaging service of disabling links to Douyin’s most popular videos. “All hail Douyin the drama queen,” retorted Tencent, WeChat’s parent, which said it had acted because the content was “inappropriate”.

• spat = a trivial quarrel

• warring：war as a verb

• dance-off：尬舞

• run 这里相当于wrote/said的那种用法

• All hail Douyin the drama queen 这句有两个常见表达，一个是all hail，就是表示欢呼的意思，一个是drama queen，相当于我们说的戏精。所以整句话是腾讯在嘲讽抖音戏精上身的意思。

• retort=rebute 

On June 1st Tencent sued Douyin’s parent company, Bytedance（字节跳动）, for 1 yuan(15  cents)  and  demanded  it  apologise  for  its  accusations—on  its  own platforms  (and  presumably  without  the  snark).  Tencent  also  alleged  unfair competition.  Within  hours  Douyin  counter-sued  for  90m  yuan.  Bytedance and Tencent later swapped accusations of tolerating smear campaigns against the other on their apps, and filed police reports about defamatory posts. 

• demanded  it  apologise...这是虚拟语气的用法，apologise就要用原形虚拟

• the  snark：biting, cruel humor or wit, commonly used to verbally attack someone or something.

• counter-sued：counter作为常见前缀表示contrary，这个单词自然是反诉的意思

Rarely has an upstart so piqued Tencent, a Chinese gaming and social-mediatitan  which  in  November  became  Asia’s  first  company  worth  over  half-a-trillion dollars. At first blush WeChat and Douyin (which translates as “trill”) appear to inhabit distinct worlds. The former is a super-app in which more than  1bn  users  not  only  chat  but  also  order  food,  give  to  charity  and  pay utility bills. Douyin is a bottomless, eclectic feed of looped 15-second videos, a  cross  between  Snapchat,  Vine  (now  defunct)  and  Musical.ly,  which Bytedance  bought  in  November.  The  clips,  shot  by  users,  range  from a dexterous noodle-maker in Chongqing to a shimmying peacock in a bamboo grove, all set to music.

• Rarely has an upstart so piqued Tencent不是正常的语序，是由于否定词rarely 提前所引起的倒装。所以正确的语序是an unstart has so rarely piqued Tencent。pique是激怒的意思。

• At first blush= when first seen

•    feed 订阅源

•    loop 循环播放 （有部电影叫《环形使者》，英文名字looper，loop本来是名        词，表示线圈，环状的东西）

•    Snapchat,  Vine and  Musical.ly 国外和抖音类似的APP

•    defunct: no longer existing or functioning

•    dexterous: skillful in the use of hands

•   shimmy：the shimmy is a dance that was popular in the 1920s and is characterized by rapid shaking of the body. To shimmy means "to shake the body in or as if in dancing the shimmy."

Different though the services are, Bytedance’s use of artificial intelligence to create tailored  offerings  for  each  viewer  on  Douyin—and  on  Toutiao,  a newsfeed—is winning attention. According to QuestMobile, a data vendor, in early 2017 users began to spend more time on Toutiao, Douyin and two other Bytedance video apps, Xigua and Huoshan, than they did on Tencent’s news and video offerings.

•  Different though the services are= though the services are different

•   tailored  offerings：

    offering refers to a thing produced or manufactured for entertainment or  sale;  tailored  means made or adapted for a particular purpose or person 所以这个词是指量身打造的娱乐视频

•  vendor 本来指小贩，或者房产卖房，这里的data vendor可以翻译成数据供应商

  
  

In the first quarter of this year Tik Tok, an international version of Douyin that launched in late 2017, became the world’s most downloaded iPhone app, excluding games (see chart)—a rare feat for a Chinese social app. It has done well  in  Indonesia  and  Thailand.  At  home  it  led  app-store  rankings  from January to May. It claims to have a user base of 300m in China, more than Kuaishou, another short-video app in which Tencent has a stake. Its appeal has  prompted  Communist  Party  outfits  to  set  up  accounts,  and,  on  one occasion, state censors to place restrictions on it.

• excluding=barring=except for

•  led  app-store  rankings ：在苹果商店排行榜上名列前茅

•  stake: 意思比较丰富的一个词，这里指股份

•  state censors to place restrictions on it.

• outfit：an association of persons, especially a military unit or a business  organization

• 最后一句的并列应该是这样的：to set up account and state ccensors ，所以是在说由于快手太火了，所以官方要对其进行审查限制

• place restrictions on 这个短语可以记住

All  of  which  has  provoked  Tencent  into  providing  a  “defensive  product”,notes Xue Yu of IDC China, a consultancy. In April Tencent resuscitated its short-video app, Weishi, a year after closing it. Its angst may stem from the fact  that  every  firm  wants  “a  top-of-mind  app”,  says  Anu  Hariharan  of  Y Combinator,  a  Silicon  Valley  startup  school,  and  a  personal  investor  inToutiao.

We Chat  has  hardly  lost  its  oomph.  A  state  agency  recently  reported  that We Chat  made  up  34%  of  China’s  total  mobile-data  traffic  in  2017.  To advertise, Douyin still relies on users sharing its videos on WeChat’s public feeds (hence its ire over the blocked videos). Still, the share of time spent by Chinese mobile users on messaging slipped from 37% to 32% in the year to March, says QuestMobile, while that spent on watching short-form video has risen  from  1.5%  to  over  7%.  Meanwhile,  Douyin  has  introduced  its  own private-messaging function, further challenging WeChat.

•   resuscitate：使苏醒，使复活

•   angst：a feeling of persistent worry about something trivial

•   stem from:  originate in or be caused by

•   oomph: 精力，活力

•   ire: anger
  

In May an essay put out on WeChat by a former tech journalist lit up social media.  In  “Tencent  Doesn’t  Have  a  Dream”  he  argued  that  the  firm  had become chiefly an investment firm buying up other startups and had lost its innovative  edge.  One  bit  of  evidence  was  that  by  the  time  Tencent  had registered Douyin’s rise, its window for a counter-attack had all but closed.The naysayer claimed his treatise drew 1m views. Still, his readers all came to WeChat.

•  lit up social media 学习这个表达

•  startup：新办企业

•  lost its innovative  edge：失去它的创新优势，注意edge的用法

• one  bit  of 学习这个修饰

• naysayer 反对者，nay表示no 

•  treatise：论文，专著
  

文章转载自微信公众号简单英语生活