《经济学家》读译参考 Translated & Edited by Chen Jilong
中国地方政府部门倾向于支持Google在搜索引擎方面的竞争对手，比如中国百度（大约占中国搜索业市场的40%份额，而Google为30%），以及在中国内地都有业务的雅虎、微软的MSN。拥有1亿用户的中国互联网市场是全球发展最快、最富利润的市场之一。以“别干坏事”自诫的Google公司，用不着自食其言，能在中国做成生意吗？
The company is making a concerted effort to do just that. It has reached an agreement with the Chinese authorities that allows it to disclose to users, at the bottom of a list of search results, whether information has been withheld. This is similar to what the company does in other countries where it faces content restrictions, such as France and Germany (where Nazi sites are banned), and America (where it removes material that is suspected of copyright infringement). Although the disclosure is more prominent on these western sites, putting such a message on its Chinese site is an important step towards transparency and, furthermore, is something its rivals do not do.
Google公司正齐心协力，就是为了“自食其言”。他们已经与中国政府达成共识，允许其搜索结果列表底部信息向用户开放，无论是否属于禁止范围。这类似于该公司在其他一些同样面临内容限制的国家中的做法，比如法国和德国（禁止纳粹站点）以及美国（疑似侵犯版权的有关材料将被删除）。尽管在这些西方国家信息公开化要更为突出，但在Google中国站点上出现这一讯息是其向透明化迈出的重要一步，更为甚者，这也是某种其中国对手无法办到的事情。
Furthermore, Google is tiptoeing into the country with only a handful of services. It is not offering e-mail, blogging or social-networking services, because it worries that it will not be able to ensure users? privacy. It wishes to avoid the situation in which MSN and Yahoo! find themselves, whereby they are forced to obey the Chinese government?s orders in censoring content and revealing users? identities. Rather than be placed in a position where it may have to compromise its values, Google instead is narrowing what it offers (although its news service will contain only government-approved media sources).
而且，Google只须提供