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
涨粉困难
帮帮车老师
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