◆导读
“青蛙公主”、“莎莎”、“紫薇”、“牛哥”，这些给冬奥运动员起的昵称简短有趣，不失为整个冬奥赛程中别有趣味的事情。
◆双语阅读
Every culture and country coins nicknames, but few do it these days with the ingenuity and gusto of Chinese sports fans on the internet. This impulse has turned the Beijing Olympics into a weeks long lesson in cross-cultural wordplay. Official phonetic transliterations of international names into Chinese — a language whose written characters convey sounds but also distinct concepts and things — can be long, unwieldy and in producing strings of unrelated characters, basically nonsensical.
每种文化和国家都会用外号，但如今很少有人能有中国体育迷网友那样的热情，来起一些独具匠心的外号。这种热忱将北京奥运会变成了长达数周的跨文化文字游戏。中文里的汉字传达声音的同时也表达不同的概念和事物，官方音译的外国名字可能很长，不方便，而且会出现一连串不相关、基本没有意义的汉字。
Methodologies for making them vary, from the simple to the puzzlingly referential: people zero in on physical characteristics or personality traits; play around with phonetic and visual puns; or toy with references to public utterances, news events or some bit of obscure history.
起绰号的方法各种各样，从简单易懂到令人费解的指代：人们对身体特征或人格特征的放大关注；玩谐音梗和视觉双关语；或将公开言论、新闻事件或一些鲜为人知的历史作为恶搞材料。
This sort of evocative nicknaming has deep cultural roots in China, according to Shaohua Guo, a professor of Chinese language at Carleton College. Children receive nicknames to offset the earnestness built into the meanings of their given names. Even for adults, the relatively low number of common surnames in China, as well as given names that are typically only one or two characters long, provide more incentives for differentiating aliases.
卡尔顿学院中文教授郭少华表示，这种引发大家共鸣的取昵称做法在中国有着深厚的文化根源。人们给孩子起小名来抵消大名的严肃性。由于中国的常见姓氏相对较少，而姓后面的名字通常只有一两个字，即使成年人也有用绰号将名字区分开来的动力。
Gu’s “Frog Princess” nickname, which she uses on her Chinese social media accounts, stems from a green helmet she once wore in competition. While that origin seems simple enough, Chinese fans online have also been using other nicknames this month that might require more explanation for outsiders.
谷爱凌在中国社交媒体账户上使用的“青蛙公主”绰号源于她曾经在比赛中戴的绿色头盔。虽然这个起源似乎很简单，但本月，网络上的中国粉丝也在使用其他昵称，对外人来说可能需要一点解释工作。
Take “Guai Ling”s: Here, fans created a phonetic smoothing of the first two syllables of Gu’s Chinese name, Gu Ailing, to make a well-meaning joke about the fact that the she speaks Chinese with a Beijing accent. (The accent is often the subject of gentle ribbing in China for its contractions and jammed-up syllables.)
以“拐凌”为例：这一次，粉丝们把谷爱凌的中文名字的前两个音节快速连读，善意地调侃她的中文带有北京口音。（在中国，北京口音里音节的省略和混合常常成为打趣的来源。）
本文节选自：The New York Times（纽约时报）
发布时间：2022.02.16
作者：ANDREW KEH, JOHN LIU
原文标题：Fly High, Frog Princess! Well Done, Chen No. 3!
◆词汇积累
1.gusto
英 [ˈɡʌstəʊ]美 [ˈɡʌstoʊ]
n.(做某事的)热情，兴致，精力
2.phonetic
英 [fəˈnetɪk]美 [fəˈnetɪk]
adj.表示语音的；音标的；与发音近似的；语音的
3.alias
英[ˈeɪliəs]美 [ˈeɪliəs]
n.别名；(尤指罪犯所用的)化名；(文件、互联网地址等用的)假名
adv.(罪犯或演员等)又名；亦名；化名
◆词组搭配
1.visual puns 视觉双关语
2.stem from 源于；出于；基于
◆写作句总结
This impulse has turned the Beijing Olympics into a weeks long lesson in cross-cultural wordplay.
结构:sth.1 has turned sth.2 into sth.3
sth.1使得sth.2变成sth.3
例句:Time has turned the young man into a man of shrewdness. Nobody can read anything from his face.