Jianjun's Blog

Some people told me if you search certain keywords using Google toolbar, Google will show up some funny results. I just tried a few, nothing happened. But my last try ‘Microsoft’ did give me the following:

This is an ad for Microsoft Forefront on the top of the result page. The funny thing is it attracted my attention not because it was in that salient position, but because it looked like a hoax! (Of course, I was expecting something funny to appear.)

Both the language used and the formatting of the tag line looked unprofessional. What is 官网? Is it something from the Mars or Microsoft-invented rubbish? To me, if there does exist such a 官网 (literally, a web site for officials), it must be another privileged (virtue) venue for those corrupt public officials. But the stupid thing hasn’t started yet.

Clicking on that link took me to an orange-colored flash web site with a PC-game-style music playing in the background. The line at the bottom says this:

‘Building this web site won’t hurt assassins, aliens or secret agents.’

What a stupid idea to put such a line here! This is totally irrelevant.

Then a few seconds later, a guy in shirt and tie appeared , constantly shivering, waiting for you to choose an opponent to fight with…

I chose an assassin and this guy conquered him by tickling him to death!

Localization is not supposed to be like this, especially when two cultures are inherently different. What in one culture produces eye-popping or jaw-dropping effects may in another culture make people feel disgusted. Besides this, irresponsible localization not only wastes a lot of efforts and money, but also turns a promotional campaign into a total failure, thus resulting in more revenue loss.

Further resources:

The ad’s English version is much better: Succinct and to the point.

English version displays this line at the bottom of the page:

The Chinese translation changed it to ‘Building this web site won’t hurt assassins, aliens or secret agents.’ If the original meaning were accurately conveyed, Chinese readers may understand it better.

To compare:

English site
Chinese site

A colleague asked me about ProZ Translation Contest some time ago. I think my reply to him may also help other people who are interested in it. So, after some editing, I put it here in my blog.

ProZ translation contest, or Proz.com Translation Contest, was first launched by ProZ.com on Feb 01, 2007. Now, after a year, there have been six such contests. From professional point of view, however, due to its business oriented nature, ProZ translation contest is not comparable to other professional translation contests. And it has many unique characteristics that are not commonly shared by such competitions:

• To participate in ProZ.com Translation Contest, you have to be a ProZ member (in ProZ terms, the sacred title ‘member’ is only reserved for a paying guy, otherwise you are a free user). And, as far as I know, this is the only ‘qualification’ you need to take part in it. In other words, ProZ.com Translation Contest is something for ProZ members – a closed-door contest.
• There is no fixed and qualified judging panel! Potentially anyone, even if a layman with no knowledge of translation, can vote. This time you don’t need to be a member!! And the translator who got the most votes wins! Certainly, this leaves open an option for a guy to call his friends from around the world to give him a vote! (You just need to take a few minutes to register a free ‘ghost’ account.) I remember in the xxxxth ProZ Contest, a guy posted in the ProZ Chinese forum publicly calling on friends to vote for him. And later he was indeed the winner. Maybe this is only a coincidence, but here is the loophole.
• The ProZ translation contest is running like crazy, one after another in a row. Within a year, there have been six such contests! The winner is issued an electronic certificate with signatures from the contest organizer – a ProZ staff – and the founder of the site. So you have something to ‘prove’ your ability. I can’t remember any well-known professional level contests are running like this, with such a ‘commercially signed’ certificate.

I personally believe ProZ.com Translation Contest is too profit-oriented to produce a fair, balanced and professionally qualified result. Of course, in which direction the contest is going to develop totally depends on ProZ itself. If they want the contest to become professionally recognized world-wide, they should change that ‘pay-before-you-can-participate’ attitude as the first step.

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.