The other day I posted some of my Podcast Asylum articles on EzineArticles.com. Within an hour of their approval, the Google alert I have set on my own name produced a link to a post entitled “Der Podcast Von Meiner Unzufriedenheit.” For those who don’t read German, that’s “The Podcast of My Discontent.”
More like the blog posting of my discontent, since it was my own article, “Podcasting without Podcasting,” translated into German and posted without the resource box linking back to my sitebut with my copyright notice and name still on it. My German is rusty, and was never colloquial, so I couldn’t really tell whether there had been human hands involved in the translation process. It surely seemed like a human mind behind the title, and German is a very literal sort of language.
So I asked the Ur-Guru, whose German is better than mine. (Dutch is very similar to German, too, so that probably helps him get a better feel for the rhythm of the language.) He assured me that it was a computer translation and no human had been involved, and I shouldn’t bother posting a comment on the blog. (Which I had already done by that time.)
I’ve had material stolen and posted to splogs (spam blogs created to generate AdSense revenue) before, but usually it’s a couple of paragraphs combined with material scraped from other people’s blogs, combined into a mishmash that makes no sense at all but apparently contains some useful keywords.
This is the first time (to my knowledge) that my material was not merely appropriated but also translated into another language. Hence “Transcraping.”
It’s difficult to prevent that kind of thing from happening, and not usually worth the effort to try protecting one’s intellectual property, especially when I’ve made the article available for reprint free of charge. And anyone reading the German would figure out who the author was, regardless of the poster’s name. (Actually, any German speaker would probably have a fit laughing at the auto-translation.) And there probably aren’t many actual readers of splogs anywayâjust bots committing click-fraud.
Then Donna Papacosta, my fellow podcasting “professor,” discovered that the article had been translated back out of German into English. Now we could fall about laughing at the way “you feel as though you really know them” became “you experience as though you really cognize them,” not to mention the way Heidi Miller became “Heidi Glenn Miller.” (An extra keyword, perhaps? A sex change Heidi didn’t tell me about?)
Mostly I laughed. But the thing is, my name is still on that article, and I work as a professional writer. As the Ur-Guru pointed out, “If someone were to take ‘Comments are male monarch in the human race of podcasting’ as your writing, it would not be good advertising for the Author-izer.”
No, it certainly wouldn’t, though I like to think my potential clients are sophisticated enough to be suspicious of English that unnatural. At least I haven’t (yet) experienced the problem some of my fellow writers have, that of someone stealing just your name and putting it on his or her own articles in order to borrow credibility.
To the best of my knowledge, there is no other Sallie Goetsch on the planet, which means that if you do a search on my name, what comes up is either me or someone (or thing) impersonating me. And at least the first thing that comes up on a Google search is my own website.
But if you read something strange-seeming with my name appended to it, check with me before you accept it as genuine.
