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.

I always love Spring! The weather is warm, and the sky is clearer and bluer. Everything is growing and the earth is full of life. It’s the best part of a year in my town – less fossil-fuel-caused smog, greener city, more apt for outdoor activities.

It’s afternoon again, time for me to sip my cup of Mocha and start blogging. I’m feeling very grateful deep inside that I have what I have today. There are so many people in the world living in terror, being bombed, shot and killed, struggling every day to live – a most basic right! There are so many people living in property, agonized by diseases and sufferings.

I have been thinking about a question: By translating, am I able to change this world even a little bit for the better? And today I may have the answer. Somebody says a translator, by way of translation, facilitates communication. Better communication in turn prevents misunderstanding and, ultimately, confrontations. However, I doubt this. Today’s world is probably equipped with the best communication in history. But confrontations are still everywhere.

So I guess, like it or not, a translator is just a medium. If he/she doesn’t make things worse (by mistranslation), then the more important thing is what is being translated, not the translator him/herself!

I feel myself more like a tool now. Cool!

By the way, tomorrow I am going to write about copycat translation web sites. I will teach you a fun way to find out if somebody is copying your web site and, by taking advantage of the text, trying to edge you out.

But what these fake ‘translator/translation companies’ do most harm to is the whole market. They are going to spoil the Internet market by cheating and churning out bad quality translations. They will also defame the professional translator society as a whole. I believe in just a few years, if these guys are not revealed and stopped, no potential client will trust any online profile.

I was just about to leave my desk when my mobile beeped. Harvest Fund sent me a message:

嘉实成长，平衡型基金，震荡市中理想选择，27 日拆分净值 1 元…
Harvest Growth balanced fund, ideal choice in a volatile market, is to split on the 27th. NAV 1 Yuan… (My translation)

2008 will be a tough year for fund managers in China. Chinese stock market works more like a casino, and investors are mostly pure speculators, investing according to gut feelings than economic data, buying and selling mutual funds like stocks! But this is not the worst thing. Fund managers also bet! During the same period, funds outside China investing in the Chinese stock market have much better performance.

So fund managers, stop bugging me with spam messages, but make sure you can survive 2008!