And, sorry, no, this is not an April Fool's joke.
It is said that imitation is the most sincere form of flattery. Wholesale plagiarism, on the other hand, is stealing.
It appears that Merlin-Translation.com has lifted in full and reposted without any attribution many articles from this blog (all the most recent ones for sure, but I've not had time to check the older articles), as well as articles from other blogs (a very quick perusal showed articles from the blog of Language Translation, Inc. and from Transubstantiation; I'm sure that a more thorough search would find many more stolen articles.
I invite other translation bloggers to check the site and see if their material also has been stolen. If it has, I suggest a joint action to compel Merlin-Translations to take down the infringing material.
A big thank you to Jill Sommer, who first spotted this scam and warned me.
It is said that imitation is the most sincere form of flattery. Wholesale plagiarism, on the other hand, is stealing.
It appears that Merlin-Translation.com has lifted in full and reposted without any attribution many articles from this blog (all the most recent ones for sure, but I've not had time to check the older articles), as well as articles from other blogs (a very quick perusal showed articles from the blog of Language Translation, Inc. and from Transubstantiation; I'm sure that a more thorough search would find many more stolen articles.
I invite other translation bloggers to check the site and see if their material also has been stolen. If it has, I suggest a joint action to compel Merlin-Translations to take down the infringing material.
A big thank you to Jill Sommer, who first spotted this scam and warned me.
Have you heard of Web of Trust?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.mywot.com/
I encourage you to create an account and rate spam sites like that one.
The real irony is that the blog owner is clearly pulling content automatically: this post, revealing as it is, has also been slurped over: http://www.merlin-translations.com/2010/04/01/warning-to-translation-bloggers-your-blog-may-have-been-pirated/.
ReplyDeleteAnd all your posts are categorized under your blog's name. Which means others may want to check for a category corresponding to their blog title.
Yes, this is a "splog" - actually I wouldn't lose too much sleep over it, these are a dime a dozen and while annoying don't do THAT much harm. I am surprised not to see Adsense ads on there though, that's usually the motive with these things - they pull in content from all over the place and then try to make some money from displaying ads. It looks unfinished still, though, so maybe that will come. It's the downside to exposing your content via RSS. Just think of the many legitimate visitors you reach thanks to RSS. Swings and roundabouts.
ReplyDeleteHaving said that, it's not OK, and if you CAN do anything about it, by all means do.
Transubstantiation here. I've been in touch with Merlin on several occasions. They refuse to answer my emails. What do you suggest we do?
ReplyDeleteYou can reply to me on my blog.
Merlin-Translations now has PageRank=0 and is out of the Google index:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=merlin-translations&btnG=Search&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=