将“痛点”译为pain point的例子很多,最常见的就是“民生痛点”(the pain points for people’s livelihoods)。法院执行难的问题也被称为pain point (A senior official of China’s top court acknowledged on Tuesday that there have been difficulties in guaranteeing full enforcement of some court judgments, calling the problem a “pain point.“)。
查询“痛点”一词的来源并没有得到权威结论,但查到这个词在经济学中的特定用法:指消费者在体验产品或服务过程中原本的期望没有得到满足而造成的心理落差或不满,这种不满最终在消费者心智模式中形成负面情绪爆发,让消费者感觉到痛。一个相关概念是“痛点营销”。英文对应的说法就是pain point,比如以下两篇《纽约时报》的文章:
“Great execution seldom saves a flawed concept. There’s no shortage of cases to learn from. Consider Webvan, HomeGrocer, NetGrocer, Streamline, Homeruns, WebHouse and Peapod. The pain point for each one of them has been getting groceries to customers’ homes.”
《At Fresh Direct, Reinvention After a Crisis》,https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/12/business/smallbusiness/12sbiz.html
While T-Mobile executives are reluctant to credit the failed merger with AT&T as the source of the firm’s aggressive new pricing strategy, they admit that they see themselves as disrupters in the market. “We want to identify every pain point for consumers in this industry and eliminate them all,” said Michael Katz,T-Mobile’s vice president for marketing.
《T-Mobile Turns an Industry on Its Ear》,https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/27/technology/personaltech/t-mobile-turns-an-industry-on-its-ear-in-a-fight-for-its-life.html
由此可见,中文“痛点”说法的来源很可能是经济领域,而中文经济领域的“痛点”很可能来自英文pain point。需要注意的是,中文“痛点”虽然可能来自英文pain point,但其使用范围已经扩大到几乎任何领域,而查找英文pain point时,得到的结果仍仅限于经济和商业范畴。
即使在经济和商业领域,pain point也不是一个普及度较高的表述,是一个“冷门”表述:
财经词汇方面的权威网络词典investopedia(https://www.investopedia.com/dictionary/)没有pain point条目,《大不列颠百科全书网站(https://www.britannica.com)没有pain point,《韦氏词典》中也没有。《柯林斯词典》里倒是能找到pain point:
但是,这个2013年由用户提交的词语仍在审核之中,没有正式被词典收录。
换句话说,中文读者看到“司法案件‘执行难’,是公正司法的难点,也是社会诚信的痛点”时无论是文字的意思还是使用的场合都不会觉得有什么奇怪。如果普通西方读者,极有可能对pain point的这种用法感到陌生。
“痛点”也可能与pain point没有关系,但这不改变pain point属于行业特定用法的事实。将中文非商业领域的“痛点”译为pain point没有考虑到pain point语境的局限性和词语使用者的小众性,虽然也不易引发误解,但总觉得有些别扭。泛指的“痛点”不必拘泥于原文文字,译为problem即可。
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