Jianjun's Blog

This blog entry was planned yesterday when I accidentally found some web sites violated my copyright, using text from my personal site http://yeasir.com to piece together their ‘own’ ones.

These guys are based in China – Beijing, Shanghai, etc. They claim themselves to be translation companies or translators translating from/to English. But they don’t seem to know how to write English! Otherwise, they would write their own copy.

To make things easier, I list search results from Google here, so you can see for yourselves (observe carefully, certain sites appear repeatedly in the results with text from different web sites!):

Search results as on March 06, 2008 (new window):

*UPDATE* Sytra.cn has recently removed some copyright material from its site and Google’s search results won’t show them as more than two months ago. Please refer to the screenshots below.

Search Result 1 (Showing Sytra.cn has the same text with TongliUSA.com)
Search Result 2 (Showing clutchbrake.blogspot.com and chineseenglishtranslation.blogspot.com copied text from my site Yeasir.com)
Search Result 3 (Showing orangelike.com, clutchbrake.blogspot.com and www.chinese-translation-service.com have the same text with Wintranslation.com)
Search Result 4 (Showing Sytra.cn has the same text with Appella.net)
Search Result 5 (Showing Sytra.cn has the same text with AppliedLanguage.com)

Screenshots (as on March 06, 2008, click to see big images):

How do you know who are the copyright violators and who are not?

I only know my web site copyright has been violated. For other sites, they have to do their own work to fight against any violation.

But I can introduce the following web sites to you:

www.yeasir.com (My own site, online since 2004 using the domains itranslate.cn and yeasir.com)
www.wintranslations.com (A Canadian translation company since 1998. Registered at ProZ in 2002)
www.appliedlanguage.com (A British translation company. They have offices in England, Bulgaria, the States and India. I work for them too.)
www.tongliusa.com (I personally know the owner, who’s a moderator at ProZ.com. And we cooperated on a number of projects)
www.appella.net (A naming company, site online since 2004)

From my observation:

1. Violating web sites copy from more than one site to ‘make’ their own.
2. Violating sites are newly registered, e.g. as new as 2007, while sites being violated are much older.
3. Use Archive.org and check their records!!! Now who’s copying whom?

As I said, the biggest harm of these copycats is they will one day destroy the professional image and reputation of translators (in this case, Chinese translators) by churning out bad translations (how do we expect somebody who can’t even write English to translate to/from English?).

If this is not stopped, in one or two years’ time, no potential client would trust any online profile from China. I’m very concerned because plagiarism among Chinese translators has become a trend (The first copycat emerged in 2005, copying my friend Donglai’s ProZ profile. But in 2007 they started copying web sites!)! If this continues, clients would have great difficulty finding reliable translators or getting reliable translation services online.

I wrote about the messy Chinese market in 2006. Now I see the International Chinese translation market is going to face the same challenges.

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