《经济学人》双语：疫情是如何影响儿童游戏的？

原文标题：

Playground lore

Jabbed you

The pandemic has given children new words to play with

游戏场里的故事

碰到你了

疫情给儿童游戏带来新词汇

The pandemic has made play at once more modern and more old-fashioned

疫情让游戏变得更时髦也更复古

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“AT SCHOOL, I’VE invented a game with my friends,” says Griffin, a nine-year-old Australian boy.

一名9岁的澳大利亚男孩格里芬说：“在学校里，我和朋友们一起发明了一种游戏。”

The rules of Corona Tip are simple. One child chases the others, touching as many as he can.

Corona Tip的规则很简单。一个孩子追逐其他孩子，尽他所能触碰更多的玩伴。

Anyone caught is “in corona”. They join the chaser in pursuit of those remaining, as do all the children they tag in turn—a neat demonstration of exponential growth.

任何被碰到的就表示“得了新冠”。他们加入追逐者的行列去追逐剩下的孩子。渐渐地，所有的孩子都被碰触而“感染”——这是指数增长的一个完美案例。

The game ends when everybody has been caught.

当所有人都被碰到后，游戏结束。

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Griffin’s account was collected by the Pandemic Play Project, one of several groups researching children’s behaviour in the covid-19 era.

格里芬对游戏的描述被收录在新冠研究项目中，这个项目旨在研究儿童在疫情期间的行为，是几个研究小组之一。

Children in many countries were kept apart for long spells in 2020 and 2021.

2020年和2021年，许多国家的儿童被长期隔离。

When they returned to school, they were often banned from touching.

当他们返校后，经常被禁止触碰彼此。

Playgrounds have been segregated by year group and some equipment removed.

操场按年龄组分隔开，一些设施被移走。

How have these changes affected play?

这些变化是如何影响游戏的？

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It is partly an anthropological question.

这在一定程度上是一个人类学问题。

Some of the researchers are inspired by Iona and Peter Opie, who wrote a series of books about children’s games, songs, rhymes and jokes beginning in the late 1940s.

一些研究人员受到了爱奥娜和彼得·欧佩的启发，这两位从20世纪40年代末开始，写了一系列关于儿童游戏、歌曲、童谣和笑话的书。

The Opies argued that primary-school children had a distinct oral culture, which they transmitted to each other under the noses of adults.

欧佩夫妇认为，小学生有一种独特的口头文化，他们在成年人的眼皮子底下互相传播。

Much of their lore was decades, even centuries old. Children’s culture, they wrote, is as special as that of “some dwindling aboriginal tribe”.

他们的许多口头故事都有几十年，甚至几百年的历史，欧佩夫妇写道，孩子们的文化就像“某些日渐衰落的土著部落”一样特殊。

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Today’s researchers have spotted many examples of covid-19 permeating play.

当今的研究人员已经发现了许多新冠病毒渗透进游戏的例子。

Australian children invented a game in which they chase each other with stones, which stand in for vaccines.

澳大利亚的孩子们发明了一种带石头互相追逐的游戏，石头代表疫苗。

Thomas Enemark Lundtofte of the University of Southern Denmark has heard children singing about covid—sometimes echoing pop songs, sometimes making up their own.

南丹麦大学的托马斯·伊纳马克·伦托夫特听过孩子们唱关于新冠的歌，有时是应和流行歌曲，有时是自己创作的。

The British-based Play Observatory has collected accounts of children playing covid-themed games at home.

总部位于英国的“游戏天文台”，收集了孩子们在家里玩新冠主题的游戏故事。

In one video a young girl swabs the nose of her toy horse with a plastic screwdriver.

在一段视频中，一个小女孩用一个塑料螺丝刀从她玩具马的鼻子里取咽拭子。

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In some ways the pandemic seems to have made children’s play more modern.

在某些方面，疫情似乎让孩子们的游戏更加现代化。

More of it takes place online: during lockdowns children spent more time playing video games like “Animal Crossing” and “Roblox” than was allowed before.

更多的游戏在网上进行：在封锁期间，孩子们花比原来所允许的更多的时间玩电子游戏，如《动物之森》和《机器砖块》。

That helped them keep in touch with each other, and also coloured their offline play.

这帮助他们彼此保持联系，也让他们的线下游戏更加精彩。

When one group of Australian children saw each other again, they tried to re-enact “Among Us”, a multiplayer video game in which some characters attempt to kill the others.

当一群澳大利亚孩子再次见面时，他们试图重演《太空狼人杀》，这是一个多人游戏，其中一些角色试图杀死其他人。

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But in other ways play became more old-fashioned.

但从其他方面来说，游戏变得越来越过时。

Alison Stenning of Newcastle University found that in 2020, during England’s first lockdown, children recolonised streets that they had ceded to cars over the years.

纽卡斯尔大学的艾莉森·斯坦宁发现，在2020年英国第一次封锁期间，孩子们重新占领了多年来留给汽车的街道。

They drew pavement games in chalk, just as their grandparents had done.

像祖辈那样，他们用粉笔在地上画格子做游戏。

When balls were banned in school playgrounds, children adopted a venerable dodge and used rolled-up gloves instead.

当球类在学校操场被禁止后，孩子们就开始玩一种古老的躲藏游戏，用卷起的手套作替代。

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Julia Bishop of the University of Sheffield suspects that references to covid and “corona” will linger in children’s lore, although they might become detached from the disease itself.“They like weird words,” she says.

尽管可能会与疾病本身无关，但新冠和“冠状”的说法将在儿童的传说中挥之不去，谢菲尔德大学的朱莉娅·毕晓普对此表示怀疑。她说：“孩子们喜欢不寻常的词语。”

A killjoy would point out that Griffin’s game is almost identical to others (such as Infection) that were played before covid-19.

扫兴的人可能会指出，格里芬的游戏几乎与新冠之前的其他游戏（如《感染》）相同。

But one characteristic of children’s lore, which the Opies noticed, is that its practitioners often claim to have just invented things that are in fact very old.

但欧佩夫妇注意到，儿童认知的一个特点是，他们经常声称自己刚刚发明出新东西，但实际上非常古老。

（恭喜读完，本篇英语词汇量600左右）

原文出自：2022年2月5日《The Economist》Culture版块。

精读笔记来源于：自由英语之路

本文翻译整理：Fei Min

本文编辑校对: Irene

仅供个人英语学习交流使用。

【重点句子】（3个）

Primary-school children had a distinct oral culture, which they transmitted to each other under the noses of adults.

小学生有一种独特的口头文化，他们在成年人的眼皮子底下互相传播。

Today’s researchers have spotted many examples of covid-19 permeating play.

当今的研究人员已经发现了许多新冠病毒渗透进游戏的例子。

That helped them keep in touch with each other, and also coloured their offline play.

这帮助他们彼此保持联系，也让他们的线下游戏更加精彩。

自由英语之路