1. Welcome to SportsJournalists.com, a friendly forum for discussing all things sports and journalism.

    Your voice is missing! You will need to register for a free account to get access to the following site features:
    • Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
    • Access to private conversations with other members.
    • Fewer ads.

    We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!

Blogger vs. newspaper war: Is this plagiarism?

Discussion in 'Journalism topics only' started by Flash, Aug 21, 2010.

  1. Dan Feldman

    Dan Feldman Member

    This is not correct, at least going by the blogger's version of events (which I haven't seen disputed, but please correct me if they have been). The blogger used a person, not Google Translate, to translate the quote.

    Unless Google translated the quote the exact same way as the blogger's source (extremely doubtful), this is plagiarism. The Sun's writer got beat, and he lifted info from a competitor without crediting. I see no way to justify what he did.
     
  2. imjustagirl

    imjustagirl Active Member

    Where are you and sic seeing this? In the original link, it doesn't say where the translation was done by the blogger, and I haven't seen any other stories on it.

    EDIT: I'm now firmly on the blogger's side. I went and found the original story on the blog site, then went to the original original story. I found the quote used as an example in the e-mail to the Sun.

    However, if you take the original quote from the foreign site and put it in Google translate, you get this:

    Which is not what the Sun ran at all. Sketchy sketchy sketchy.
     
  3. waterytart

    waterytart Active Member

    If you speak a language in addition to English, think up a sentence more complicated than "The dog is brown", and see what Google Translate does to it. The result should be comprehensible, but it is almost never correct.

    What IJAG quoted above is very representative of Google Translate's work.
     
  4. Glad "imjustagirl" took the time to understand the story, unlike most on this thread.

    The controversy, in short form: Pension Plan Puppets, a Leafs blog, has a reader translate a Czech article quoting Leafs defenseman Tomas Kaberle's father saying some very controversial things. The Toronto Sun finds that story on the blog -- an editor admitted that after the plagiarism claims started -- and would not have found it had the blog not translated the story in a readable manner (i.e. not using Google Translate).

    At the very least, a courtesy mention of where the Sun found the story might have been in order.

    But the more important issue: The Sun used the blog's translation wholesale while claiming it was simply using it as a "reference" against a Google Translation. In fact, the translated quotes from the blog are the ones published in the Sun. The blog did the paper's work for it, and didn't get any credit.

    Read the timeline and some of the interaction here:

    http://www.pensionplanpuppets.com/2010/8/24/1636727/the-toronto-sun-steals-from-blogs

    As for the question of plagiarism, it's an interesting one. Is the lone translation of a foreign language article a transformed work? The Sun didn't publish its own translation or the original Czech quotes; it published one writer's take on what that article said.

    Bottom line: Had the blog paid $1,000 to have the article translated and the Sun took that work without credit, it's a different conversation for those so quick to side with the paper.
     
  5. nmmetsfan

    nmmetsfan Active Member

    The newspaper editor screwed up when he said he got the translation from Google. If he'd just said nothing there would be no case.

    However, regardless what you think of blogs or bloggers, it's shitty to pass this off as your own find. If the blog doesn't exist, chances are you don't make the find in the first place. The right thing to do is to give them credit in this case. Not for legal reasons, but for ethical reasons.
     
  6. C'mon. If the blog had done the interview, that's one thing. But the blog was merely repurposing information gathered by someone else.
    The Sun paper also repurposed the information, extracted from the original source. The translation issue is a red herring. Its hardly proprietary.
    The blogger is just pissed because people actually noticed the paper's story. That's no different from a small newspaper publishing a story about some kid phenom, and the New York Times following it with its own story. Happens all the time.
    The plagiarism charge is ridiculous.
     
  7. nmmetsfan

    nmmetsfan Active Member

    I'm not saying there's a plagiarism case. This isn't like the New York Time following with its own story. It's like the New York Times taking direct quotes from the small newspaper story and passing them off as their own.
     
  8. The newspaper didn't pass of the quotes as their own. They credited the Czech site, the original source of the info.
    The blogger seems to think it deserves credit for first repurposing the original information.
    If that's the case, are we all required to credit Google?
     
  9. nmmetsfan

    nmmetsfan Active Member

    Did someone from the newspaper get on the Czech site and find the quote? No, they took it from the blog. Then pretended they didn't. Sounds shitty.

    We use Google to find a source, from which we get information. We don't get the information itself from Google.
     
  10. the paper did go the Czech site. The blog alerted them to it, but it did its own follow
    from the editor:

    "To be clear, ­ we did see the story first on the sports blog. Then we did what journalists are supposed to do - ­ checked the original article from Hokej, ran it through Google Translate and did our own work to validate and rework the quotes for accuracy.

    "Quotes, as you're aware, are part of the public record and it's acceptable journalistic practice to use quotations from another source particularly if they are properly attributed.

    "That's what we did, attributed quotes we used in our story to Hokej, which actually invested the resources into interviewing Kaberle's father and producing the original story."
     
  11. crusoes

    crusoes Active Member

    It's time for you folks to get out of the basement and spend time outdoors.
     
  12. 93Devil

    93Devil Well-Known Member

    Do any research of the Bible and its many translations from language to language, and what IJAG is pointing out really makes you think.
     
Draft saved Draft deleted

Share This Page