Jianjun's Blog

For those who still don’t know what Feedjit is: it’s a real-time traffic monitoring service. By putting a Feedjit widget on your blog, you will see live visitor information such as where the visitors came from, how they came and their landing page. The widget is highly customizable so you can personalize it to fit your blog’s color scheme. It works fine for a sidebar display, cute with all those small national/regional flags and clickable links to traffic sources. On the other hand, Feedjit also offers visitors an option to turn off the monitor, so next time around their information won’t be logged and show up again.

Due to the great popularity of the service, Feedjit recently (I noticed it since last Friday, March 7, 2008) seems to experience frequent technical difficulties. The space where visitor information is usually displayed often becomes empty and obviously some visitor information is not logged. Their home page put up a notice saying scheduled maintenance was underway from x time – y time. Then, after it came back for a few hours, it was down again with a similar notice.

As a fan of Feedjit, I hope they can solve the problem soon and continue their great service with even better stability. To get your own Feedjit code, simply visit their home page.

Wanna know how much a kilo of beef costs in New York or where to change your damaged windshield wipers? Just visit ChaCha and text your question to them via the web page, you are promised to receive the answer (to your cell phone if it’s a US number) in minutes! I tried the first question on twitter as I’m in China and got the answer as follows:

Question
how much does a kilo of beef cost in new york

Answer
At Rube’s, New York Strip would be $$ 66.00 for 1 kilo of premium meat. Thank you for asking Chacha!

Visit Source Website

View info about your guide Jimmy V.

Isn’t this cool?

As stated on their web site, the service is assisted by human guides who will search the information for you in case their system doesn’t have the information. They have rules about what questions are acceptable. So use it wisely . By the way, if you are on twitter, simply follow them here: http://twitter.com/242242 and DM them the question and get answered!

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.