Copying of website

Marita Marcano, is a translator from English, French and Spanish to German based in the USA. Together with Ursula Sauer in Germany, she works under the name of MM Translations Inc. I ‘know’ Marita from the pt translators’ group at www.yahoogroups.de.

Marita found the English pages of her website had been copied by a translation agency in Korea.

The copy was rather faithful to the original, even leaving the firm name in one place, and claiming that interpreting is available only in the Kansas city area. Here is an example:

Original (formatting removed):

bq. Update to the new German spelling
On July 1, 1996 the political representatives of German-speaking countries signed a common declaration about the reform of the German spelling rules. The reform took effect on August 1, 1998. There is a transitional period until July 31, 2005, in which the old and new spellings are allowed to coexist. After that only the new spelling rules will be valid.
For more information on the new German spelling go to Related Links.
With all your German documentation updated
you will be up to date linguistically
all of your materials will be consistent in appearance and spelling

Korean copy:

bq. Update to the new Korean spelling
On July 1, 1996 the political representatives of Korean-speaking countries signed a common declaration about the reform of the Korean spelling rules. The reform took effect on August 1, 1998. There is a transitional period until July 31, 2005, in which the old and new spellings are allowed to coexist. After that only the new spelling rules will be valid.
For more information on the new Korean spelling go to Related Links.
With all your Korean documentation updated
you will be up to date linguistically
all of your materials will be consistent in appearance and spelling

6 thoughts on “Copying of website

  1. A comment by Gabe Bokor on FLEFO which I take the liberty of posting:

    Your blog site gave me an idea: I entered the first words (“Conveying your message across linguistic and cultural barriers”) of my website (accurapid.com) in Google, and I found no fewer than 6 (six) sites, ranging from Russia to Thailand, that had copied the exact wording of my site. It seems to be SOP for Asian translation agencies to cull text from U.S. & British sites

  2. As a Korean interpreter/translator, I am shocked and embarrassed about the report on the shamless copying of material from another’s website by the Korea-based agency in question.

    To suggest, however, that “(it) seems to be SOP for Asian translation agencies to cull text from U.S. & British sites,” is both juvenile and quite out-of-line. For it betrays an attitude unbecoming of a professional, and smacks of a base, odious kind of self-righteous attitude, if not outright bigotry.

    I wonder– has the writer forgotten that it was the British government which of late so shamelessly lifted the material from a certain Ph.D. candidate’s analysis on the Iraqi regime? Or how about Senator Joe Biden’s speech some years ago about his purportedly difficult childhood years, which was later revealed to be a word-for-word lifting of a speech by– if memory serves me correctly– Neal Kinnock of the British Labor Party? Or has the writer simply chosen to demonstrate that there are some in this world who do stupid, unscrupulous things, and others who make stupid, uncalled-for comments about such things?

    On a more positive note, related to these concerns about copyright and authorship attribution issues concerning material on the Internet, there should be little or no concern about the comments in question being correctly and permanently attributed to the person who made them– words which will be immortalized in the memories of many for the brilliant, astute manner in which it so poignantly captures the real issue here: that people will always look at the speck of sawdust in another’s eye, while paying no attention to the plank in their own (Cf. Matthew 7:3~5).

    Whether borne of a momentary lapse in judgment or a lack of manners and a good upbringing, those careless words and unkind thoughts may someday come back to haunt the writer, who now has the dubious distinction of belonging to the same category as those whom s/he accuses: the shameless.

    How did Shakespeare put it?– “All fools we!”

    Albert S. Kim

  3. I must say I crossposted that message from CompuServe without permission, and perhaps the form of words was more casual than it would have been if it had been posted here originally. I think the writer was just drawing conclusions from the results of a search. I apologize for posting it and causing offence, as I don’t imagine any of us thinks this behaviour is typical of those countries.
    (My own web site is not worth copying!)

  4. Actually, it occurs to me that people all over the world plagiarize websites, but not all of them take the language – some just take the layout. I know Per Döhler’s website at http://www.triacom.com was stolen, but if the other person didn’t use the same wording, you couldn’t trace it with a search engine. Or at least, I think you can set Google to search the html, and then you might just manage it.
    Just to disprove that, I also found Gabe’s wording used by a Canadian on the translatorscafe.com site, and on an Australian site too.
    LATER NOTE (December 30th, 2003: Anatoly Zolotkov of Translatorscafe.com queries the last mention. I cannot at this date confirm it. I believe that in July there was a Canadian member of the Translatorscafe site using this wording; at the present date, Gabe’s website is showcased as Agency of the Hour, and the words come up as a straight quote from Gabe, so no plagiarism there, just free publicity. MM

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