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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.
中国一个领先博彩网站的用户昨日发现自己对世界杯(World Cup)比赛的投注遇到障碍。国内两大互联网集团之间爆发口水战，焦点是谁要对一个在线支付引擎的中断负责。
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.
在决定世界杯小组赛结局的关键比赛即将开赛之际，登录腾讯(Tencent)旗下移动博彩网站QQ彩票(QQ Lottery)的用户被告知，网站将不再接受“支付宝”(Alipay)充值服务，此举惹恼了不少用户。支付宝是腾讯的竞争对手、电子商务公司阿里巴巴(Alibaba)的在线支付部门。
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?”
腾讯坚称，此举缘起一个技术问题，即QQ彩票的用户在用支付宝充值后不能及时到账，“严重影响用户体验”。不过，用户们对此持怀疑态度。新浪微博（Weibo，类似于Twitter的中国微博客平台）的一个用户用一个挖鼻子的表情符号回应，并问道：“真的是这个原因吗？”
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.
许多观察家推测，腾讯封杀支付宝，是为了提高其与之竞争的在线支付引擎“财付通”(Tenpay)的使用量。腾讯否认了这一指控。财付通一直难以扩大市场份额，而支付宝在中国的在线支付市场占据霸主地位。北京互联网咨询公司艾瑞咨询(iResearch)估计，支付宝占有50%的市场，而财付通的市场份额为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.
这场交锋升级为一场骂战，支付宝在微博上称，腾讯对于封杀支付宝的解释是“扯淡”。腾讯代表张军更有分寸一些，他发帖回应称，对目前局面“没必要过度解读”。
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.
分析师们预测，中国三大互联网公司之间将爆发一场战争。无论是按照营收、市值还是流量来衡量，阿里巴巴、腾讯，以及搜索引擎百度(Baidu)都跻身于全球前10大互联网公司之列。它们推出相互竞争的打车应用和即时通讯服务，并在众多领域角力，从餐厅点评应用，到在它们的视频平台上投放哪些美国电视系列剧。
The rivalry remains mostly civilised, but the companies have occasionally become more aggressive, for example blocking rivals’ customers from using their sites.
这些竞争行为多数仍是文明的，但这些企业偶尔会变得更加咄咄逼人，例如阻挠对手的用户使用自己的网站。
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，在阿里巴巴与合作伙伴UC优视(UCWeb)合资推出移动搜索引擎“神马”(Shenma)、叫板百度之后，使用UC浏览器访问百度的人得到一条出错信息，称他们使用的是一款“不支持的浏览器”。几天后，这个问题就消失了。
Yesterday Tencent representatives insisted the technical glitch with Alipay was only temporary – and Alipay’s fault.
昨日腾讯代表坚称，与支付宝相关的技术故障只是暂时的——而且是支付宝方面的过错。
“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.”
“现在双方技术团队正在一起查，究竟是什么原因导致彩票购买无法及时到账，”张军在他的微博中写道。“大家应该有更多理性。”
