Mastodawn

#murcia #murciatoday #plagiarism

Can anybody see the similarity in the article from La Opinión and the local online English language rag, Murcia Today?

https://murciatoday.com/drought-decimates-almost-a-million-murcia-trees_1000165564-a.html

Drought decimates almost a million Murcia trees

The local online English language rag even has the cheek to protect their marvellous journalism from being copied.

🤣🤣

@marcusjenkins It’s usually very easy to get round this copy “prevention”. If you want to know how, ask.

@alexproe No problems, I've circumvented quite a lot of this kind of thing in my time!

In this particular case, however, I could go back to the original La Opinión article in Spanish, copy, paste to Google Translate to English and, lo and behold, I'd have almost exactly the same article that appears in Murcia Today. Fancy that! In fact, I could do that with 90% of the articles appearing in Murcia Today! 🤣

@alexproe To be fair they did do a bit of paraphrasing, but what are the odds that they chose exactly the same stock photo?! 🤔

@alexproe A day's dull work at the Murcia Today newsdesk:

* Surf the main Spanish language online newspapers - La Verdad and La Opinión
* Select articles that might be of interest to #Gammons in the golf ghettos
* Google Translate to English
* Paraphrase a little and top and tail with a sentence to titillate the tory readership
* Be sure to leave some seriously non-idiomatic English from the machine translation
* Publish, surrounding with online ads & copyright protection
* Lunchtime!

@marcusjenkins Thought you might have found a work around. There is another way - a little bit fiddly but not hard. BTW My translating work has dropped to zero! Funny that too! 😉

@alexproe Sorry to hear that your translating work has dried up. Every day my eyes and ears are tortured with terrible translations from Spanish to English. Either straight Google Translate or, as I suspect in the case of larger organisations, "oh, just ask Juanita, she has a C1 in English!". Yeah, right. Even if they do get a Brit to check it, they manage to find an illiterate moron who'll work for cheap - in plentiful supply on the Costas!

@marcusjenkins Am surprised to hear they haven’t discovered Chat GPT etc powered translations which are generally much better than Google Translate etc. Having had a little experience with translation memories, I can understand why ChatGPT might be better at translating than Google’s tool.

@alexproe Ya, they probably are using #ChatGPT, come to think of it, because I'm sure you could even ask ChatGPT to do a little bit of paraphrasing an top & tail with an "original" sentence!

@marcusjenkins Oh yes, Chat GPT is extremely good at paraphrasing. The days of journalists are numbered. Soon automated systems will pump out written content. Actually, I believe this is already happening. We probably don’t even know we’ve just read a machine generated article.