Jianjun’s Blog

Hello John,

I just received from you a second comment with exactly the same content of a message you left a couple of days ago. As you do seem to have a habit of leaving comments on irrelevant posts and, at the same time, ignoring my reply to your comment, I think it’s advisable to write a post to draw your attention so you could stop this SPAM act.

On July 18, 2008, you left on Kelly’s post a comment (http://www.yeasir.com/blog/2008/06/how-to-keep-up-with-the-times/#comment-2587) as follows:

Hi Jianjun
I am lucky to find your blog on the web. We invite you to write original articles for a blog named as Westernwords operated by our company, which is about strategies, news, trend and case study of translation industry. I will appreciate you to order your articles with 500-1000 English words about the above aspects above.
You can quote me by one article and I will paid after I release it on our blog. I will give you a subject each time or you may choose a subject confirmed by us to start writing.
I will need 4-8 articles each month.
As a cooperation return, I would request a link from your blog to ours in order to have both of our articles shared by wide audience.
Hope we have a long term cooperation.

And my reply (http://www.yeasir.com/blog/2008/06/how-to-keep-up-with-the-times/#comment-2588) was:

Hello John,

Thanks for leaving a comment on my blog.

As a localization professional, I blog for fun and for sharing interest with friends around the world, and I’m not interested in writing commercial pieces for other sites - otherwise, I’d be X times richer by just blogging.

I suggest you hire someone who’s a professional writer to contribute to your translation blog.

Good luck!
Jianjun

However, you posted the same message today (July 21, 2008) on my post “Can Translation Change the World for the Better” (http://www.yeasir.com/blog/2008/03/can-translation-change-the-world-for-the-better/#comment-2590)

As a matter of fact, after receiving your ‘comment’ the other day, I checked your sites Transhorsa.org/com out and even tried your phone and fax numbers listed on http://www.transhorsa.org/Contact_us.htm (No 30, #14-04, Sturdee Road, Singapore 207852 TEL: +65 6493 3637 FAX: +65 6733 6786) in Singapore (some fake translation companies use fake addresses/numbers so I have to do this routine check). Unfortunately, both numbers, at the time of my check, had a problem - the phone number being nonexistent, while the fax number being the same with another company called Corporate Visions (http://www.bizspace.net/rental.php).

As I said in my reply to your first post, I am a localization professional and I blog only for fun and not for money. Now I’d also like to add (just in case), that all the information under the domain Yeasir.com and its network of websites are copyright material. Any use of this information without prior written permission from its respective copyright owners is prohibited.

I hope this post is enough to draw your attention to the issue and hope no further ‘comment’ of a similar nature from you or your company appear here again.

Many translators would agree that living in the country where your source language is spoken is the best way to build upon your existing language skills and give your translation career a certain credibility. It’s hard to disagree with this view. Immersing yourself in the local language and culture is the ideal way to equip yourself with the linguistic and cultural knowledge needed for a career in translation. What better way to learn obscure slang and the latest ‘buzzwords’ than through daily interaction with native speakers from all walks of life?

Not all translators have the luxury of living in the country where their source language is spoken, whether it is due to family obligations or financial circumstances. Trailing spouses and partners of expats may find themselves living in a country where neither their native nor source languages are spoken, working as translators in countries where their language combinations are in lesser demand.

Thanks to the Internet, however, there are still ways for translators and other language professionals to maintain, even improve, their language skills and keep up with the latest terminology and developments in their chosen areas of specialisation. As a former freelance translator looking to re-enter the highly competitive world of Chinese-to-English translation, it’s important for me to know what the latest trends in the PRC and Greater China are, which political and social ‘buzzwords’ are in fashion and, like all other translators, continue to learn new words and expressions on a daily basis. Language is constantly evolving and 普通话 (国语 in Taiwan) is by no means an exception.

I have a list of resources I have found invaluable and would like to share with fellow Chinese-to-English translators, especially those of you who are no longer living in the ‘Middle Kingdom’. If there’s a resource I may have missed and which you feel a translator should have among their list of bookmarked sites, then do not hesitate to leave a comment with a link to the resource in question.

• Online Dictionaries : There are a number of fairly good online dictionaries. One of my personal favourites is Jukuu, which lists a number of example sentences with every search result. iCIBA is also a link worth bookmarking. It’s important to note that these dictionaries do not necessarily provide translations for highly specialised or technical terms. Links to specialist online dictionaries and glossaries will be dealt with in a separate post.

• Internet Slang : For those who come across obscure slang while browsing online forums, check out 网语网. It’s quite possible that much of the slang and terms listed on that site will be out of date by the time I finish writing this post. Nevertheless, it’s one of the best resources I have found thus far for the rapidly-evolving language of ‘net speak’.

• New Terms & Buzzwords : The Chinese Terms section of the People’s Daily Language Tips website is full of useful words and phrases. The site is actually aimed at ESL learners but those wishing to boost their Chinese vocabulary may find it equally helpful. Latest additions include 高清晰度的卫星图片 (high-resolution satellite photo) and 堰塞湖 (quake lake). The Shanghai Daily’s Buzzword Blog is another great resource, which gives the reader a bit of background information about each ‘buzzword’.

• Glossaries : While I intend to cover specialist glossaries in another post, I thought I would share a link to a site which has a sizeable collection of subject-specific glossaries. FanE.CN’s has over 20 pages’ worth of glossaries and word lists for subjects ranging from media and traditional Chinese snacks to needlework and real estate.

Online newspapers, radio and blogs are also excellent ways to stay informed about linguistic and social developments in the Chinese-speaking world. I will review a selection of these in my next post.

This is all for my debut post at Jianjun’s Blog. Check back often for more of my articles on the challenges of Chinese-to-English translation.

FireFox now displays a warning (see picture on the left, click to see large image) when you are tricked to click on some of the ‘Pics for MSN Friends’ phishing site URLs created by the so-called ‘TST Management Inc.’

At the time of writing, a new URL emerged and, according to the ‘official’ phishing site’s server status report, “c0mpics.info” is now the most active site that’s hoaxing not only MSN users, but ICQ users.

When you visit the phishing site (never do it!), a window pops up displaying content from ‘awesomeoffers.info’ (see picture below, click to display large image) saying, ‘We’re sorry! This offer is not available in your area. You will

be redirected shortly. If you are not automatically redirectly, please click here.’ Then you are served ads from various sources.

Thanks to our fellow netizens, sites such as jumphost.info, ther1ng.info, etc. were alerted as potential phishing sites by FireFox. But if you are using IE or Safari, the chances are you won’t see these warnings.

Personally I think MSN and ICQ should do their fair share of work and warn their users never trust any offline messages containing such links. That will be the most effective and proactive way to deal with these bad guys. However, each one of us who knows about the phishing attempt can also lend a helping hand by telling our MSN/ICQ or other IM buddies about this and report any such sites through FireFox or IE.

Here’s how:

FireFox:

When you are on that site, click on ‘Help’ -> ‘Report Web Forgery.’

French version, click on ‘?’ -> ‘Signaler un site contrefait…’

IE:

When you are on that site, right-click this icon on bottom status bar.

*UPDATE*

Good news. As on June 6, all phishing sites from the so-called ‘TST Management Inc.’ have been down. But I am not sure if they are simply banned by the ISP in Hong Kong and are in the process of finding other server locations. If you find any further information, please let me know. Thanks.

*UPDATE-1*

The phishing sites are back on again. A new one to watch:

“freakpics.info”

Gladder is a free FireFox plugin that works as a proxy server pool picker. (To learn more about it, read this article.) However, recently I found each time I use Gladder to visit my friend’s blog, the browser is redirected to www.sheetr.com (see below):

As this persists, it has led me to think about Gladder’s security strength and the possibility of its being hacked by such web sites.

Besides, as Gladder proxies are unencrypted, data transmitted through these servers are transparent. In other words, your data can still be filtered by the Firewall and you are denied access to many web sites. Furthermore, Gladder can’t deal with scripts, flash and a number of other multimedia features, meaning you can’t watch Youtube movies, Google movies and so on.

If it has so many limitations and annoying redirections, I don’t see any reason to continue using it. Anonymouse provides all Gladder functionalities without installing anything onto your disk.

Most SEO experts tell us that identical (duplicate) content will negatively affect our website’s search engine ranking and may even result in our websites being penalized. Well, to some extent, this may be true, as we do hear people say their websites are being banned or even dropped from search index. But according to my recent observation, those are probably just some very rare cases.

Some of the most notorious copycat websites almost don’t have any original content. They simply search on the Internet and found those keyword-rich articles and heap them together to make a gigantic website. They do things that Google ‘threatens’ to punish but they do get very good SEO results!

Their tactic is very simple. The site owner sets up a large number of blogs on free platforms with the same duplicate content linking to one another with most links back to the main site, while the main site doesn’t link back to these satellites. At the same time, they submit all those blogs to search engines and services such as Technorati to get better exposure and higher authority.

Let’s look at a live example: ‘translation183.bloglipi.com‘. The blog not only uses duplicate contents from other websites, but also has unknown number of embedded keyword-rich links to its main site - sytra.cn.

On Technorati, there are 19 blog reactions to it (see http://www.technorati.com/search/translation183.bloglipi.com) and one of those reacted back has an authority of 58 (see http://www.technorati.com/blogs/jonramos.com/wpmu/translation182). Needless to say, all those ‘reactions’ are created by the same guy and those blog names mostly have a ‘translaiton183′, ‘translation182′ or something similar.

I guess no SEO experts will actually recommend such a strategy to generate traffic, but it works. In just a few months time, Sytra.cn generated a very good traffic of more than 6,000 unique visits per month and a Google pagerank of 3.

Please don’t take me wrong. I’m with you in condemning such copycats + spammers and I believe what they are building right now will in the end be their tombs (something a Semantic Web will do well).

The purpose of this article is to show you search engine algorithms of today are far from perfect in dealing with such abusive acts and, at the same time, some unintentional duplicate content or a little too many links probably won’t do us much harm in regard to SEO.