Plagiarism and Content that Never Will Be

Until recently, I was working on a comprehensive directory of the etymologies of hundreds of (682, to be precise) names given to warships of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Silly me, I had even toyed with the idea of making that content accessible on a corner of my website.

I have suspended all efforts to create that content, for a good reason.

Several times I had an article on my old website discussing the conventions used in naming of IJN ships.

I recently discovered (for the nth time, actually, where n is an angering integer) that significant portions of that article have been included verbatim and put into a Wikipedia page discussing IJN ship naming conventions, written by an anonymous author, of course, and without any credit given to the original content or permission from me to use the content as a significant part of the article.

To set the record straight, I had restored that article to a corner of my website that houses such non-business content as demonstration of what was stolen, but have now even removed that, as it would likely just bring more theft, including clueless claims that it was “public domain” because it was publically accessible.

We live in a world in which criminals get away with crime because they have been given anonymity by the tech bros claiming to create a wonderful world by connecting people. I say lock the criminal tech bros up and take back intellectual property rights they have made super-easy to infringe.

The Internet is awash with stolen and criminal content. Billionaires claiming to have a mission to connect people partner with outright criminals, including, for example, Chinese criminals on Facebook using what appear to be AI-generated photos of whores, who might turn out to be thugs in Kosovo. Such garbage has become the norm.

But not to worry. If you install an ad blocker, you can pretend you don’t know that it’s happening. But it’s still happening.

Returning to the plagiarism, it could be that many people don’t realize that stealing and republishing content without permission and with no credit given is a crime. Why? Because you can get away with it, so it must not be a crime, right? Anonymity is the friend of criminals.

Weeks ago I asked on an IJN-related Facebook group if anyone knows who created or manages the offending Wikipedia page, but I don’t have much hope of getting a useful answer, and that lack of hope has turned out to be justified. Information wants to be stolen, right? I suspect it is a member of that group who took and republished the content.

Not surprisingly, in the above-noted Facebook group, there is virutally no original content, most members concentrating on scanning and uploading photos from published books. Such is the nature of much of social media.

A Business Model for Manufacturing Automobiles That Are Good Enough

Custom Global Mobility is in the business of selling bespoke cars manufactured from the ground up to meet detailed customer requirements. This includes the body, the engine, the power train, and all other parts of the cars they sell.

Although CGM has no manufacturing facilities and has no knowledge or understanding of automotive technology, it positions itself as a car manufacturer producing high-quality vehicles to satisfy detailed customer requirements. In the process of doing that, however, there are a few things going on that their customers don’t know about.

Because the business model CGM follows does not require them to manufacture vehicles themselves and even explicitly calls for the outsourcing of every aspect of vehicle production, the company is aiming to drastically reduce the costs normally associated with a traditional manufacturing operation by outsourcing everything.

CGM boasts of a global team of automotive experts and claims to have thousands of expert automotive design and manufacturing people on their team, turning out best-in-class cars precisely meeting customer requirements. A look under the CGM hood reveals quite a different story.

Since CGM has no automotive manufacturing personnel, they must find and use vendors to design and manufacture the vehicles they sell. Those tasks are complicated by CGM themselves having almost no expertise in automotive manufacturing or even any knowledge of (and ability to evaluate) automobiles. But they undertake to overcome these deficiencies by what they call smart outsourcing.

Since they lack in-house expertise, even the task of evaluating and certifying vendors is outsourced to other vendors. For a manufacturing vendor, the typical sequence is that a vendor candidate is given manufacturing drawings for an auto part (which are generated by outsourcing to one of CGM’s design vendors) and is asked to deliver a part for evaluation. For example, as a test, CGM might ask a candidate to manufacture a con rod.

Naturally, since CGM cannot judge the quality of the trial con rod and doesn’t itself have an incoming inspection department, it sends the part to another vendor—sometimes a vendor they use just for such very certification—for evaluation. If the test evaluation vendor gives thumbs up, the candidate is certified as a manufacturing vendor for CGM.

Such certified vendors have been able to sell parts or assembled vehicles to CGM under the condition that they use only the machine tools specified by CGM. The use of any other milling machines, lathes, or machining centers, for example, is prohibited.

Although a vendor might have some questions during the process of manufacturing, since CGM is totally unknowledgeable about automotive technology, it cannot themselves answer those questions, and usually tells the vendor to just manufacture in accordance with the drawings. For CGM, going back to the vehicle purchaser, who is not an automotive expert and just wants to buy a car, is not an option, since the purchaser would probably not be able to answer such questions from the CGM vendor and might (correctly) conclude that CGM doesn’t know what it’s doing.

Because of a lack of skilled vendors to work cheaply enough to satisfy CGM, they commonly need to use vendors that produce sub-standard products. Although that might sound problematical, the use of such vendors has actually reduced CGM’s overall manufacturing costs. These defective products are sent to other vendors to repair, followed by an outsourced “quality assurance” process, relying on what CGM calls “automotive quality assurance experts.”

In recent years, CGM has started using an automated manufacturing system to produce fully assembled vehicles in-house. They simply dump the client’s requirements for a vehicle into the system, and out pops an assembled vehicle.

Occasionally (and, more seriously, unpredictably), the automatic vehicle-production system used by CGM builds totally faulty parts into vehicles or assembles them incorrectly, so they use vendors (more of those automotive quality assurance experts) to find and correct these problems, sometimes including re-machining and assembly of numerous parts. CGM finds that the abundant availability of automotive quality assurance experts willing to work cheaply enough—combined with the low cost of the initial manufacturing of vehicles by using their automated in-house manufacturing systems—enables their business model to succeed. And the key to all of this is that the vehicles produced are good enough to satisfy customers and cause no safety problems.

If you are a freelance translator, the above should sound quite familiar. If you are a translation consumer, however, you might not realize what goes on after you order a translation from a translation broker, but be aware that, more and more these days, it is likely to be similar to CGM’s approach to manufacturing vehicles. There are better ways of providing products and services to clients.

Some Thoughts on Content Creation and Theft

I’ve never been fond of the term “content creator”, basically because it’s thrown around by large numbers of people who have nothing to say, other than that they want to be thought of as content creators. That self-applied term is as meaningless as things like start-up (which has become a meaningless buzzword in Japanese as well), entrepreneur, solopreneur, and a diverse spectrum of other popular buzzwords. Anyone can call themselves a content creator, and that has led to a serious devaluing of the term.

But for people who actually create content or have likenesses they wish to protect the rights to, the Internet—and social media in particular—has simply enabled theft thereof without consequences, including theft of material purportedly protected by laws.

Anything you create and dare to put online can be unlawfully published and used to make profit, and there’s virtually nothing you can do about it that will have any effect, unless you are a large corporation with a team of attorneys, and even those entities are plagued by pirating and unlawful publishing.

The provenance of most of the content uploaded to social media is unknown and undisclosed, not that disclosing the provenance grants publishing rights; it does not. Since a lot of that content it is the result of a multiple unlawful publishing, an unlawful republisher very likely doesn’t even know who owns the content they have unflawfully republished. The proliferation of “Where is that?” questions about photos and the annoyance of some thieves with those questions is evidence of this situation. The unlawful republisher often does not know from where an impressive photo was taken.

Anonymity and the social media business models that rely on providing and protecting user and advertiser anonymity have rendered legal remedies meaningless, even if they were economically feasible, which they seldom are.

This is demonstrated by the countless anonymous page posts on Facebook. Zuckerberg is certainly not interested in stopping these posts, because they provoke engagement, and engagement gives him and his company more money and increased power to capture the attention—and manipulate the behavior—of what are now billions of users.

The game has been won by the tech giants, and it looks like nobody is willing to stop them. People who remain silent are guilty of contributory negligence and act as accomplices, although apparently many haven’t a clue as to what’s going on.

Jaron Lanier was right.

Thoughts on stock photos and AI-generated photos

You often see company websites with photos of what are intended to look like groups of employees, sometimes sitting in a meeting room or standing around chatting. These are almost all stock photos, purchased for the purpose of decorating a company website with attractive photos of attractive people who have no connection with the company using the photo.

A typical stock photo of a group includes:

  • handsome males,
  • beautiful females, and
  • a woke makeup of genders, ethnicities, and ages.

Some people might look at the photo and believe that these are actually people who work at the company or are customers for the company’s products or services. Many will not. Is that an honest way to present the company? Perhaps some people would say no.

Now take an example of a company using a typical AI-generated photo depicting the same type of group, which includes:

  • handsome males,
  • beautiful females, and
  • a woke makeup of genders, ethnicities, and ages.

There are still people who would say this is dishonest, but there is an aspect of the photo that would disclose clearly to visitors to the website that what they are viewing is fake. One out of five of the people depicted will have the wrong number of fingers on one of their hands or have their left or right hand attached to the end of the wrong arm.

There you have it, honesty restored by embracing one of the strengths of AI, anatomical hallucination.

(On the occasions we might use AI for photos (we never use it for translation), we flag that fact by using a mouseover text that indicates the source.)

It’s not that difficult: Translators, Interpreters, and Linguists

A surprising number of people seem to misunderstand the distinctions between translators, interpreters, and linguists. Worse yet is the misunderstanding that any of these categories of professionals should be expected to be able to do the job of the others.

Admittedly, even respected dictionaries leave room for—and can be accused of promoting—confusion between these terms. People spending large budgets on language services, however, should reasonably be expected to distinguish between these three terms of art in the field of language services. The differences are not difficult to grasp.

To be sure, there are a small number of people who cross the boundaries between the professions, but these are quite rare, and a translator should not be assumed capable of interpreting, or an interpreter of translating.

Translators

A translator engages in translation, which is the production of a text written in a target-language from a text written in a source language. Translators write words, but work without uttering a word that they are translating. A Japanese-to-English translator works from a Japanese source text, translating it into an English target text. Only a small portion of Japanese-to-English or English-to-Japanese translators are capable of interpreting between those languages, and most do not even want to be interpreters.

Interpreters

An interpreter engages in interpreting (rarely, but confusingly, sometimes called interpretation), which is the expression of a message spoken originally in the source language as a message spoken in the target language. While there are exceptions, most Japanese/English interpreters consider themselves exclusively interpreters and do not actively seek out translation assignments. Many of them would not be good translators.

Linguists

The term linguist is just a bit more problematical, because of a range of meanings. Strictly speaking, a linguist is a specialist in, not surprisingly, linguistics, which deals with the characteristics of language, including aspects such as structure, syntax, semantics, and origins.

In many years of serving the commercial translation market, we have encountered only a small number of working commercial translators who were also linguists, and have met very few linguists who are actively translating or who are even capable of translating or wish to translate as a profession. That separation is even greater when we consider linguists who might interpret. There are very few such people. Similar to the case of translators, interpreters and linguists are two quite distinct groups.

People who should know better, but don’t, misuse the term linguist, and some who know better, purposefully misuse the term.

You often see translation companies (particularly the ones more accurately characterized as translation brokers) boasting of all the “linguists” they have. This makes one wonder why they would talk about a group of professionals not generally engaged in or proficient at translation when they are trying to sell translation services.

Perhaps they think it makes the people they sell translations to feel better that their documents are being translated by people called linguists. Or perhaps they think that the translators they purchase translations from will feel better working for low rates if they can wear the title of linguist.

To be fair, there is the argument that linguist just means someone who is good at a number of languages, but professional translators realize that being “good at a number of languages” doesn’t mean you can translate.

There you have it, a short description of three often-confused professions. Although it might be optimistic for language professionals to expect people outside these fields never to confuse them, when a non-specialist such as a client gets it right, we feel more comfortable than when we need, for example, to inform an interpreting client that will we not be translating in their meeting or deposition.