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Users of a leading Chinese betting site found their efforts to place bets on World Cup games thwarted yesterday amid a spat between the country’s two largest internet groups over who was to blame for the outage of an online payments engine.
中國一個領先博彩網站的用戶昨日發現自己對世界杯(World Cup)比賽的投注遇到障礙。國內兩大互聯網集團之間爆發口水戰，焦點是誰要對一個在線支付引擎的中斷負責。
With deciding games in the tournament’s first stage about to be played, tempers frayed when visitors to Tencent’s mobile betting site QQ Lottery were told they would not be accepting payments from Alipay, the online payments arm of Tencent’s rival, ecommerce company Alibaba.
在決定世界杯小組賽結局的關鍵比賽即將開賽之際，登錄騰訊(Tencent)旗下移動博彩網站QQ彩票(QQ Lottery)的用戶被告知，網站將不再接受“支付寶”(Alipay)充值服務，此舉惹惱了不少用戶。支付寶是騰訊的競爭對手、電子商務公司阿里巴巴(Alibaba)的在線支付部門。
Tencent insisted it was a technical problem caused by delays in account transfers on the Alipay side, “which negatively affects the user experience” on its QQ betting site. But, customers were sceptical. One user of Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, responded with an emoticon of a face picking its nose and asked: “Is this really the reason?”
騰訊堅稱，此舉緣起一個技術問題，即QQ彩票的用戶在用支付寶充值后不能及時到賬，“嚴重影響用戶體驗”。不過，用戶們對此持懷疑態度。新浪微博（Weibo，類似于Twitter的中國微博客平臺）的一個用戶用一個挖鼻子的表情符號回應，并問道：“真的是這個原因嗎？”
Many observers assumed Tencent had blocked Alipay to boost usage of its competing online payments engine Tenpay, a charge Tencent denies. Tenpay has struggled to gain market share amid Alipay’s dominance of online payment – estimated by Beijing internet company iResearch at 50 per cent against Tenpay’s 20 per cent.
許多觀察家推測，騰訊封殺支付寶，是為了提高其與之競爭的在線支付引擎“財付通”(Tenpay)的使用量。騰訊否認了這一指控。財付通一直難以擴大市場份額，而支付寶在中國的在線支付市場占據霸主地位。北京互聯網咨詢公司艾瑞咨詢(iResearch)估計，支付寶占有50%的市場，而財付通的市場份額為20%。
The exchange escalated to a war of words in which Alipay derided Tencent’s explanation for the outage as “bullshit” on its Weibo feed. Tencent representative Zhang Jun was more measured, responding with a message not to “overinterpret” the situation.
這場交鋒升級為一場罵戰，支付寶在微博上稱，騰訊對于封殺支付寶的解釋是“扯淡”。騰訊代表張軍更有分寸一些，他發帖回應稱，對目前局面“沒必要過度解讀”。
Analysts have been predicting war between China’s three internet companies. Alibaba and Tencent, with search engine Baidu, are in the top 10 internet companies globally, whether ranked by revenues, market capitalisation or traffic. They have launched rival taxi-hailing apps and instant messaging services, and compete over everything from restaurant review apps to which US TV serials are shown on video-hosting platforms.
分析師們預測，中國三大互聯網公司之間將爆發一場戰爭。無論是按照營收、市值還是流量來衡量，阿里巴巴、騰訊，以及搜索引擎百度(Baidu)都躋身于全球前10大互聯網公司之列。它們推出相互競爭的打車應用和即時通訊服務，并在眾多領域角力，從餐廳點評應用，到在它們的視頻平臺上投放哪些美國電視系列劇。
The rivalry remains mostly civilised, but the companies have occasionally become more aggressive, for example blocking rivals’ customers from using their sites.
這些競爭行為多數仍是文明的，但這些企業偶爾會變得更加咄咄逼人，例如阻撓對手的用戶使用自己的網站。
In April, after Alibaba and partner UCWeb created Shenma, a joint venture mobile search engine designed to compete with Baidu, users of UCWeb’s browser who visited Baidu received a message that they were using an “unsupported browser”. After a few days the problem went away.
今年4月，在阿里巴巴與合作伙伴UC優視(UCWeb)合資推出移動搜索引擎“神馬”(Shenma)、叫板百度之后，使用UC瀏覽器訪問百度的人得到一條出錯信息，稱他們使用的是一款“不支持的瀏覽器”。幾天后，這個問題就消失了。
Yesterday Tencent representatives insisted the technical glitch with Alipay was only temporary – and Alipay’s fault.
昨日騰訊代表堅稱，與支付寶相關的技術故障只是暫時的——而且是支付寶方面的過錯。
“Both our technical teams are working together to look into the matter and investigating the reason for the delay in account transfers when purchasing QQ Lottery,” wrote Mr Zhang on his Weibo feed. “We all need to be more rational.”
“現在雙方技術團隊正在一起查，究竟是什么原因導致彩票購買無法及時到賬，”張軍在他的微博中寫道?！按蠹覒撚懈嗬硇??！?/p>
