牛津词典2019年度词汇：“气候紧急状态”
Oxford Names ‘Climate Emergency’ Its 2019 Word of the Year

Oxford Dictionaries has named “climate emergency” as its 2019 Word of the Year, choosing it from an all-environmental shortlist that also included “climate action,” “climate denial,” “eco-anxiety,” “extinction” and “flight shame.”
《牛津词典》（Oxford Dictionaries）将“climate emergency”（气候紧急状态）列为2019年年度词汇，它是从一份全部同环境有关的词汇候选名单中选出的，其中还包括“climate action”（气候行动）、“climate denial”（否认气候变化）、“eco-anxiety”（生态焦虑）、“extinction”（灭绝）和“flight shame”（飞行羞辱）。
The Word of the Year citation is intended to highlight “a word or expression shown through usage evidence to reflect the ethos, mood, or preoccupations of the passing year, and have a lasting potential as a term of cultural significance.” Recent winners have included “toxic,” “youthquake,” “post-truth” and “vape.”
年度词汇的标准是选出“一个词语或表达方式，其用例能反映过去一年的社会风气、情绪或关注点，并可能具有持久的文化意义”。最近的入选词汇包括“toxic”（有毒的）、“youthquake”（青年震荡）、“post-truth”（后真相）和“vape”（电子烟）。

Normally, the shortlist includes a variety of different words that illustrate new trends in language usage. While the choices are often politically inflected, Katherine Connor Martin, an editor at Oxford Dictionaries, said the unusual decision to focus on climate-related terms reflected a “demonstrable escalation” in the language around climate.
通常情况下，候选名单包括各种反映语言使用新趋势的词汇。《牛津词典》编辑凯瑟琳·康纳·马丁（Katherine Connor Martin）表示，尽管这些词汇的选择往往带有政治色彩，但将重点放在与气候相关的词汇上这一不同寻常的决定，反映出围绕气候的语言“明显升级”。

“When we were looking through the evidence, it was just clear that issues relating to the climate were running through all the different lexical items we were working with,” she said. “It reflects it was a real preoccupation of the English-speaking world in 2019.”
“当我们查看证据时，很明显，与气候相关的问题贯穿了我们研究的所有不同词汇，”她说。“这反映出，在2019年，这是英语世界真正关注的问题。”

The use of the term “climate emergency” increased by a hundredfold since 2018, according to data collected in the Oxford Corpus, a database containing hundreds of millions of words of written English. In fact, it was the most common compound involving “emergency,” occurring three times as often as the next most-common, “health emergency.”
根据包含数亿书面英语单词的数据库——牛津语料库（Oxford Corpus）收集的数据，自2018年以来，“气候紧急状态”一词的使用增加了100倍。事实上，“气候”是与“紧急状态”最常出现在一起的组合，是第二常见的“健康紧急状态”的三倍。

In part, Ms. Martin noted, this reflects a deliberate decision by some news organizations, including The Guardian, to use “climate emergency” or “climate crisis” instead of “climate change,” to better convey the urgency of the situation.
马丁指出，这在一定程度上反映了包括《卫报》（The Guardian）在内的一些新闻机构的深思熟虑，它们决定用“气候紧急状态”或“气候危机”而不是“气候变化”来更好地传达形势的紧迫性。

Oxford’s choice of an all-environmental shortlist, Ms. Martin said, did not reflect a similar deliberate decision to focus people’s attention, but a reading, if a necessarily subjective one, of the lexicographic evidence.
马丁说，牛津选择了一份全部同环境有关的词汇候选名单，并不等有类似媒体的那种刻意的、为吸引人们注意力的决定，而是一种对词典编纂证据的解读，尽管这种解读必然是主观的。

“When we considered all the possibilities, a narrative really coalesced this year around words associated with ecological concerns,” she said.
“当我们考虑所有可能性时，确实发现有一种贯穿全年的叙事，是围绕与生态问题有关的词汇展开的，”她说。

来源：纽约时报文摘

心译翻译工作室

英语翻译