你真的懂这些办公室行话吗？行天下必备

 The workplace is a fascinating place for anyone who loves language. There’s something about the office environment that seems to encourage the inventive use of language. For better or worse, the English language is often toyed with in the office space, creating whole new words and phrases that you’ll seldom hear outside of an office environment.

对于喜爱语言的人来说，工作场所是一个极其具有吸引力的地方。办公环境看起来似乎是鼓励人们尝试创造性的使用语言。不管怎样，英语经常被玩弄于办公场所，人们经常创造出全新的单词和短语，你可能很少在办公环境外的地方听到过这些短语。

Here are some of the most common words, phrases and idioms that you’ll come across if you’re working in an English-speaking office today.

如果你现在在一个说英语的公司工作的话，下面是一些你可能会遇到的使用最普遍的单词，短语和习语。

Water-cooler chat

茶水吧闲聊

This is an Americanism that has crossed over into British English too. Most offices these days have a water cooler, and this phrase has come to mean anything that people talk about when they happen to meet at the water cooler. This tends to refer to gossip or trivial things like discussing what happened in the soap opera that was on last night.

这是一个美式短语，它同样也存在于英式英语中。现在许多公司都有饮水机，这个短语的意思是，大家在喝水的时候碰到会谈论一些事情。这会涉及到一些闲聊或者琐碎的事情，像讨论前天晚上肥皂剧的剧情是怎么发展的。

Close of play

下班临近

Often shortened to COP in emails and text messages, and also as end of play or EOP, this simply means by the end of the working day. Why do bosses ask if they can have this work done by close of play rather than just asking if they can have it done today? Perhaps they are trying to make work sound more fun, as close of play is a sporting term, particularly used when it comes to cricket, where it means when the game ends for the day.

在邮件和短信里通常会被缩写为COP，也同样可以写作EOP,end of play，它的意思仅仅是下班前。为什么老板会问他们是否能在下班前把这个工作做完而不是问今天他们能不能把它做完？也许他们在尝试让工作听起来更有趣，结束是当做一个体育术语，特别是用于板球的结尾，在这里它的意思是一天板球运动的结尾。

Annual leave

休假

In the days before office-speak took over, people would simply say that they were going on holiday. But that doesn’t sound quite corporate, serious and professional enough. So you’ll often find people referring to their summer holiday as their ‘period of annual leave,’ for example, in their out-of-office auto reply email.

这些天，在办公室闲聊接手之前，人们会简单的说他们要去度假。但是这听起来相当不合群体，不严谨和不专业。因此你会经常发现人们会提到他们的暑假作为他们的‘休假’，例如，在他们不在办公室的时候回复邮件。

Hard copy

打印稿

More and more of our work documents are created and shared online without the need for printing, which is better for the environment as well as saving us time and effort. But sometimes real, physical documents are required. When someone wants a physical print out of a document rather than an electronic copy, they will ask for a hard copy.

我们越来越多的工作文件没有必要打印，在网上直接写出来同大家一起分享，这种环境会更好，也会节约我们的时间和努力。但是有些时候真的，一些物理文档是需要纸质版的。当有人想要纸质文件而不是电子版的文时件，他们会要一个打印稿。