Plagiarism is copying someone’s words, ideas, research without due acknowledgment. It is not only unethical but destructive career-wise. Therefore, academicians and journalists have to be careful to avoid the issue of plagiarism in their works.
The reason behind plagiarism taking place
Usually, plagiarism happens in academic writing and research papers when students put off doing assignments for far too long or are called into a high-pressure situation wherein they feel panicked.
It is usually a lack of time management and organization skills. Sometimes it can even be an honest mistake wherein they forget to cite sources for their articles, especially for the figures and diagrams, not only writings.
Another common reason why plagiarism happens in academic papers is that students fail to write a summary of an article or paraphrase without plagiarizing.
With an increasing amount of materials available online, it is straightforward to plagiarize an article or an idea without realizing it. But intentional or not, plagiarism needs to be avoided at all costs as it can harm the careers of the people involved.
- Translation plagiarism
With all the talk about plagiarism, the primary type of focus is mostly given to direct plagiarism, paraphrasing, or unintentional plagiarism. However, with modern technology taking over the world, another kind of plagiarism has been on the rise.
Translation plagiarism, as the name suggests, is translating content into another language. It presents it as a new idea or article without acknowledging that such a scientific work has been recorded in another language.
Thus, copying not only the text but also the idea from another language without due reference counts as plagiarism.
Translation plagiarism is done because some amount of the article undergoes rewriting when putting through an automatic translation system, which will lower the possibility of plagiarism detectors reporting it as plagiarized work. It is thought to help in reducing the risk of plagiarism detection.
- Detecting plagiarism
Usually, plagiarism detection follows the same principle while checking for plagiarised content. The text files are broken down into short phrases called strings.
A string of text from one document is taken and compared to find the same string in other documents. In this method, the plagiarism detector searches millions of articles online to look for similar phrases or copies.
When they match, a similarity report is provided by the detector. Apart from that, a URL to the site where a similar document or article has been found.
Problems in detecting translation plagiarism
While the string matching method works for copy-paste plagiarism, it’s challenging to detect translation plagiarism in this way. Many such examples can be seen on the internet.
For example:
“It being an extremely stormy weather, the match was canceled. The mood in the stadium turned gloomy and the spectators left.”
When translated to French, it becomes:
“Étantdonnéun temps extrêmementorageux, le match a étéannulé. L’ambiancedans le stadeestdevenuesombre et les spectateurssontpartis.”
When translated back:
“Due to extremely stormy weather, the game was canceled. The atmosphere in the stadium turned dark and the spectators left.”
Thus, automated translators translate well enough to understand something, but not well enough to detect plagiarism in French.
Accuracy is a bit challenging
- Although the sentence does retain most of its original meaning, it cannot be flagged down as plagiarising by any free plagiarism checker. Plagiarism detectors mainly look for matching phrases and duplicate content while checking for plagiarism.
Usually, word for word translation is not done by the plagiarism checkers, as shown above. The main sentence structure is somewhat distorted, and phrase-to-phrase matching is not possible. Due to the different grammar structure or sentence phrasing, it becomes difficult to detect plagiarism.
- Another reason why translation plagiarism cannot be detected is that there is no right way to translate.
For example, fillemeans girl in French, but it also means a daughter or a woman. Thus it is essential to know the context that has been used. The detector has to understand the background to check for plagiarism in French.
However, this is quite an impossibility. Hence, checking plagiarism for French translation remains challenging, but not an impossible task.
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