中文导读
无论是抖音，还是TikTok，一上线就捕获了当下年轻人的心，TikTok的活跃用户更是高达10亿。
TikTok在海外的火爆将其母公司字节跳动推到了聚光灯之下，一家还未上市的科创独角兽，一家广告收入超百度、腾讯，紧追阿里巴巴的中国科技潜力股。
字节跳动的发展势头比起当年的脸书更是有过之而无不及，成为一家家喻户晓的公司或许只是时间问题。但字节跳动目前所面临的最大拦路虎却是美国政府。
双语阅读：
1
As covid-19 has forced the world’s teenagers out of school and into their rooms, they have turned to a familiar digital companion, TikTok. The short-video app was downloaded 115m times in March. Its nearly 1bn regular users enjoy silly clips of dog antics alongside pandemic advice from the World Health Organisation. Collectively, TikTok videos tagged with #coronavirus have been watched 53bn times.
新冠疫情蔓延全球致使学校停学，年轻人只能纷纷待在家，于是TikTok(抖音国际版）就顺理成章成为了他们的电子密友。三月份，这个短视频软件的下载量高达1.15亿次。将近10亿TikTok日常活跃用户喜欢在软件上观看狗狗的搞笑视频，同时他们还能得到世界卫生组织的一些疫情建议。在TikTok上，所有带有新冠病毒标签的视频加起来的播放量达到了530亿次。
companion 伴侣；伙伴
2
TikTok’s popularity over the past two years has shone the spotlight on ByteDance, its Beijing-based developer. Founded by a Chinese computer scientist, Zhang Yiming, in 2011, it is now the world’s biggest unlisted technology “unicorn”, recently valued at between $90bn and $100bn. It is also the only technology firm bar Apple with more than 100m users in both China and America, where TikTok has taken on the likes of YouTube and Instagram.
近两年TikTok的火爆将字节跳动推到了聚光灯之下。字节跳动总部位于北京，是开发TikTok的母公司，由中国的计算机程序员张一鸣于2011创立。字节跳动是现在世界上最大的未上市科创“独角兽”，近期估值约在900亿至1000亿美元之间。它也是苹果公司之外唯一一家在中国和美国都拥有1亿用户的科技公司，TikTok也在美国与Youtube和Instagram等社交平台扳手腕。
shine the spotlight on.../ put..under the spotlight 将..置于聚光灯下
bar 除了...之外
take on 与...较量
3
And ByteDance isn’t done. The 60,000 people in its buzzy offices—“We are like flies,” says one former employee—crank out one app after another. In the past year it has launched a worldwide corporate-software service (Lark), a music-streaming app in India and Indonesia (Resso) and, in China, a messaging rival to WeChat. As other firms sack workers amid covid-19, ByteDance is hiring 10,000 globally. It plans to employ 30,000 on top of that this year.
然而字节跳动还远不满足于此。6万名员工在字节跳动喧闹的办公室里——“我们就像苍蝇一样”，一个前员工说，——一个接一个地在开发应用程序。去年，字节跳动推出了一款全球企业办公套件（飞书），并在印度和印度尼西亚推出了一款音乐流媒体软件Resso,还在中国推出了一个用于匹敌微信的即时通讯软件。新冠大流行期间，各个公司都在裁员，字节跳动却在全球范围内招聘1万名员工，计划今年在此基础之上新招3万名员工。
4
ByteDance is not the first Chinese firm with foreign ambitions. Commodity giants such as CNOOC, an oil firm, have been buying foreign reserves, and rivals, since the 1990s. In the past decade industrial giants have pursued Western competitors from carmaking (as with Geely’s purchase of Volvo) to chemicals (ChemChina’s of Syngenta). More haphazardly, conglomerates like Fosun and Anbang splurged ontrophy assets (including Club Med and the Waldorf Astoria hotel, respectively).
字节跳动并非是首家拥有进军海外野心的中国公司。自上世纪90年代开始，像中海油这样的大宗商品巨头，就一直在购买海外及其竞争对手的储备。在过去的十年里，从汽车制造行业(如吉利收购沃尔沃)到化工行业(中国化工收购先正达)，行业巨头一直在追赶西方的竞争对手。更随意的是，复星(Fosun)和安邦(Anbang)等企业集团在奢侈性资产上的一掷千金(分别投资了地中海俱乐部(Club Med)和华尔道夫酒店(Waldorf Astoria hotel))。
haphazardly 偶然地；随意地
splurged on 大肆花费；一掷千金
trophy assets 奢侈性资产
5
Unlike most of its peripatetic predecessors, though, ByteDance has built its empire by making products that appeal beyond China. It is China’s first global software giant. It has also courted foreign investors. Filings in Hong Kong show that it has used an arrangement called the “Sina structure”, which allows it to accept money from abroad, since its founding (many Chinese tech firms turn to this structure only when eyeing a stockmarket listing in America). Around 80% of ByteDance’s investors are non-Chinese. So are four of its five board members. The other is Mr Zhang.
不过与大多数潇洒的前辈不一样，字节跳动是通过打造在海外拥有吸引力的产品来建立自己的帝国的。字节跳动是中国第一个全球软件巨头，吸引了外国投资者的目光。根据香港的文件显示，自字节跳动创立以来就一直在采用“新浪架构”，这种架构能够让公司接受外国资本（许多中国科技公司只有在考虑在美国上市的时候才会采用这种架构）。字节跳动大约8成的投资者都不是中国人，5名董事成员中只有张一鸣1名中国人。
peripatetic 逍遥的；不固定的
court 讨好；设法获得
6
All this helps ensure ByteDance is not, in contrast to many Chinese tech upstarts,in hock to Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent—which is handy, for Bytedance competes with China’s tech titans for ad revenue. It makes most of its money selling ads in its two main Chinese apps: Douyin, a Chinese TikTok, and Toutiao, a multimedia-and-news app akin to Facebook’s newsfeed (its WeChat rival, Duoshan, disappointed).
这些举措都让字节跳动没有步上许多中国科创企业的后尘——把自己典当给阿里巴巴，百度和腾讯——这很有用，因为字节跳动是要跟中国科技巨头争夺广告收入的。字节跳动的主要收入都来源于自己的两款中文应用程序：抖音和今日头条（类似于脸书新闻推送的多媒体新闻应用程序）。字节跳动旨在匹敌微信的多闪表现令人失望。
in hock to 典当；向..借款；（向..融资）
7
How much money it makes, exactly, is unclear: as a private company Bytedance does not publish its accounts. But leaks and statements from investors put last year’s revenue at between 104bn yuan and 140bn yuan ($15bn-20bn), more than Uber, Snapchat and Twitter combined. Its ad revenues in China surpassed Tencent’s and Baidu’s and now trail only those of Alibaba. It reportedly turned a profit in June 2019, a feat in the world of loss-making unicorns.
字节跳动具体多少营收并不清楚：作为一家私营公司，字节跳动不公布账目。但据泄露的消息和投资者的声明，字节跳动去年的营收在人民币1040亿元至1400亿元(合150亿至200亿美元)之间，超过了优步、Snapchat和推特的总和。它在中国的广告收入超过了腾讯和百度，现在仅次于阿里巴巴。据报道，字节跳动在2019年6月实现盈利，这在一直处于亏损的独角兽世界里是一项壮举。
trail 落后于
8
If the firm generates $25bn in sales this year, as it is expected to despite covid-19, it will have done so three years faster than Facebook. It is the only big Chinese firm whose share of the domestic advertising market is growing fast, from 9% to 17% in 2019, according to Bernstein, a research firm. A recently launched advertising network, Pangle, which lets advertisers reach consumers across any of its non-Chinese apps, may at last help it monetise TikTok.
如果字节跳动今年营收达到250亿美元（尽管受疫情影响，也预计会达到），字节跳动将会比当时的脸书还早3年达成这个目标。据研究公司伯恩斯坦(Bernstein)称，字节跳动是中国唯一一家在国内广告市场份额快速增长的大公司，从9%增长到2019年的17%。最近推出的广告网络平台Pangle可以让广告商通过它的任何非中文应用接触到消费者，这可能最终会帮助它TikTok的流量转化为收入。
9
No wonder American rivals are trying to clip its wings. Facebook’s TikTok clone, Lasso, has flopped. YouTube is said to be developing another (called Shorts). But the biggest threat has emerged in the form of America’s government, wary of China’s rise in any sphere.
也难怪美国的竞争对手都想要剪断字节跳动的翅膀。脸书的TikTok克隆版Lasso已经失败了。据说YouTube正在开发另一款名为Shorts的视频应用程序。但字节跳动面临最大的威胁来自美国政府，因为它对中国在任何领域的崛起都保持警惕。
10
Politicians in Washington fear that data on American users is being handed to Beijing; that Chinese algorithm designers are infecting impressionable Western youngsters with communist propaganda; and that ByteDance content is censored in line with party whims. In March two Republican senators introduced a bill that would ban TikTok from all government devices. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) is reviewing ByteDance’s acquisition in 2018 of Musical.ly, another app, which had 60m users in America and Europe.
美国的政客有三大担忧：一、担心字节跳动会把美国用户的数据会传给中国;二、担心中国的算法设计师用共产主义宣传感染易受影响的西方年轻人；三、担心字节跳动的内容是按照党的意愿进行审查的。今年3月，两名共和党参议员提出了一项法案，禁止所有政府设备使用TikTok。美国外国投资委员会(CFIUS)正在审查字节跳动一笔在2018年收购Musical.ly的交易，这款应用程序当时在美国和欧洲拥有6000万用户。
11
In statements, TikTok has said that it stores all American “user data in the United States” and that its American operations are “not influenced by any foreign government, including the Chinese government”. The firm is trying to mollifycritics and has hired prominent security and legal experts in America to help it. Last month it opened a “transparency centre” in Los Angeles, where it promises to share information about its content-moderation, privacy and security controls, and said it would stop using moderators in China to handle content from users outside the country.
TikTok在声明中表示，所有美国用户数据都是存储在美国的，其美国业务“不受包括中国政府在内的任何外国政府的影响”。字节跳动为了平息批评者的声音，还请了美国一些杰出的安全和法律专家来帮助它。上个月，它在洛杉矶开设了一个“透明中心”，承诺分享有关内容审核、隐私和安全控制的信息，并表示将停止用中国的审核员来处理来自国外用户的内容。
mollify 平息；缓和
12
That, most lawyers and technologists reckon, may help get CFIUS off its back. Listing ByteDance in Hong Kong, which is under consideration, may also foster trust. So would anointing a non-Chinese successor—though, at 37, Mr Zhang may not be ready to retire. As a last resort, he is said to be willing to contemplate spinning TikTok off. That would cement the digital divide between China and the West—until another hit ByteDance app tries to bridge it.
大多数律师和技术专家认为，这可能会帮助字节跳动摆脱美国外国投资委员会。字节跳动正在考虑在香港上市，这也可能促进信任。任命一位非中国籍的继任者也是如此——尽管37岁的张先生可能还没有准备好退休。据说，作为最后的手段，他愿意考虑分拆TikTok。在另一个热门的字节跳动应用程序能弥合中国和西方之间的数字鸿沟之前，这将是一个有效的方法。
anointing 任命
contemplate 考虑
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