China's language research center unveils top 10 media buzzwords of 2020

BEIJING -- China's National Language Resources Monitoring and Research Center released the top 10 media buzzwords of 2020, highlighting matters that grabbed the spotlight of the country's media outlets and linguistic features of the reports.

The list was compiled with the help of linguistic information processing technology from a corpus of articles, programs and news stories totaling 1.9 billion characters appearing in nine newspapers, 20 radio and TV stations, and four web portals from January to November.

Chronicling the changes in people's lives and economic and social development in China in 2020, English translations of these 10 phrases are roughly as follows:

-- Work and production resumption

The resumption of normal production and business activities.

-- COVID-19

An infectious disease caused by a newly discovered coronavirus.

-- Asymptomatic infections

A person who has no relevant clinical symptoms of COVID-19 but tests positive for the virus.

-- Cabin hospitals

Makeshift hospitals built in converted sports venues, exhibition and convention centers, and other facilities for the centralized treatment of mild COVID-19 cases.

-- Health QR code

Automatically generated quick response codes that are assigned to citizens as an indicator of their health status.

-- Digital RMB

A legal tender to be issued by the People's Bank of China.

-- Service trade fair

China International Fair for Trade in Services.

-- Dual circulation

China's new development paradigm of "dual circulation," where the domestic and overseas markets reinforce each other, with the domestic market as the mainstay.

-- Tianwen-1

Name of China's first interplanetary mission to Mars launched on July 23, 2020. "Tianwen" means "Questions to Heaven" and comes from a poem written by Qu Yuan (about 340-278 BC), one of the greatest poets of ancient China.

-- Contactless delivery

A delivery method in which goods are delivered without direct contact between delivery personnel and recipients.