Translation Plagiarism

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Thanks to the development of technology the world is getting smaller and smaller. As the people from different parts of the world communicate more frequently, cross language plagiarism, also called translation plagiarism, is bound to arise. In most cases, authors can directly copy ideas from other language and culture without taking any risks. Meanwhile, the authors can gain both fame and wealth in their region. On the other hand, even if we detect the authors who plagiarized ideas from other language, it’s very difficult to judge it. Moreover, there is almost no such possibility to stop as they usually cross international borders. In this article, a typical case of translation plagiarism will be introduced, and followed by reasons, social impact and potential solutions.

“Fang Zhouzi” is one of the most famous Chinese scientific writers who is also well known for his campaign against pseudoscience and fraud in China. He is keen to find other Chinese scholar’s plagiarism cases and make the result known to the public. Chinese people always said “Tall trees catch much wind”, which means a person of high position is liable to be attacked. As he became more and more famous, some of his articles are even found to be plagiarism. Most of them are considered to be translation plagiarism.

According to China Academic Integrity Review, more than 60 of his articles have suspicion about plagiarism. I cannot say all of those 60 are cross language plagiarism. At least, some of them really make sense. Here is a famous example of his plagiarism:

In 1995, he was a graduate student in Michigan State University. He wrote a paper, “What Is Science?” (《科学是什么?》), which discusses the definition of science. In next decades, this essay was published ...

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... another language? Then you won’t believe there is any automatically translation plagiarism search system.

Does that mean we have no way to detect translation plagiarism? Definitely not. What we need is an international organization working on it and supported by governments. They should hire people who know more than one language and make them working on detecting translation plagiarism. The good news is that they will work hard if they are living on the exorbitant fines. Besides, we should design an international essay archiving system which can put similar topic papers together. Then, it will be easy to make comparisons between them.

Anyway, though we may have lots of supervision and punishment. I hope scholars can stay honest to make the academia pure and clear.

Grade: 75.

Your ideas are nice, but your language needs to be polished.

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