Strange thing with one of my stories...

[Smokey125]

Just one. Has this happened to anyone else? I was browsing randomly, and completely by chance happened to find one of my stories (which is entitled "Won't You Smile Awhile For Me") has been posted on another site, but in literal Swedish, weirdly enough. And what I mean by "literal Swedish" is—I actually speak Swedish, coincidentally—it's translated, but REALLY badly. I mean, it's like someone just took each word one by one and then put them side by side. The translation stinks. But that's not all. I Google-searched it, and it's on another few pages in other languages as well, one of them is another Scandinavian language—yeah, Danish, I just checked—and one's in Finnish. And each of them only has one page of the story, furthermore. I guess this is kinda...interesting, but mostly it's bizarre. Does anyone know what's going on here, or if this has happened with anybody else's stories? Thanks.

 

[sr71plt]

Sure. Stories are lifted from here and reposted elsewhere frequently. This is the Internet. Where there is a capability, it will happen.

I have wondered in the past who vets the content of the foreign-language stories posted to Lit.

Some of mine exist in foreign-language translations (including here, I'm told). But translation and reposting permissions were requested for the ones I know about. Beyond that, I have to believe that if someone wants to steal and repost, they will do so. This is the Internet, and fighting against it is just an exercise in Whack-a-Mole. I put most of my stories in the marketplace in either anthologies or expanded versions before posting them here, so I'm making money that's to be made off them up front.

 

[Smokey125]

sr71plt

Thanks for the input. I guess it's not really that uncommon or unnerving, just struck me a little strange. Guess you're right, things like this are bound to pop up elsewhere sooner or later. And if someone reads one of the really bad translations, and wants enough to find out what's going on with it they can search the proper names and find the "real," English version. I guess I should just be alarmed if I see the real thing, in English, copied and credited to someone else—i.e., plagiarized. Thankfully, I suppose that's why we have them copyrighted on Lit.

 

[sr71plt]

Thankfully, I suppose that's why we have them copyrighted on Lit.

Hate to open this can of worms again, but putting them on Liteortica does nothing in terms of getting them copyrighted. If you are writing in the United States, the only functional way of getting copyright protection is to formally register them with the U.S. Copyright Office. You can't go to court without holding a formal copyright and if you can't go to court all you can do is to posture and bluff and hope your bluff works.

Maybe you'd have better luck if you're writing in another country, but I've never seen/heard of a successful take down from another sight that wasn't straight, successful bluff.

 

[Darkniciad]

Quite a few of mine have been translated to German over the years ( that I know about )

They didn't ask for permission, but they credited me, so I took it as free advertising. If you search for my pen name, my website and story site profiles are pretty much the entire first page, so even an unlinked credit finds me without problem.

There are probably oodles of sites out there stealing stories and translating them. Most authors will never know about them because they and their readers don't understand the language in question. I have quite a few German fans, so that's how I found out about the translations of mine.

Most of them are probably run through a free internet-based translator and thus barely resemble the originals. Apparently I was lucky enough to have someone bilingual translate mine with care.

 

[Sammael Bard]

Well, you're story is a goner the moment you put it on a free website for everyone to read. I can understand the anguish over shoddy remakes, but that's that. Nothing you can do about it, except see what other people have to say about it.


Loops and loops and loops of debates will rage on about this thing, but in the end, it's a moot point as long as you don't formally register a copyright on your story.

Take this thing in a positive stride and see it as free advertising, as Dark has already mentioned.

 

[Smokey125]

I see...

Thank you for setting me straight about the copyrighting. Yeah, I wasn't particularly offended by it or anything, just slightly intrigued and a bit confounded. I thought the idea was flattering until I realized just how bad the translation was, as I mentioned, but oh well, again, if someone wants to find the original story bad enough, they can do so. All right, well, perhaps I will look into getting them REALLY copyrighted one day, but in the meantime, again, thanks for the replies.

 

[oggbashan]

Some of these sites are built by bots that just take the first page of a story to provide content. If they are translated it is also done by a bot.

I have 1st pages of many of my stories in weird places on the internet, apparently as fillers for paid-for sites about Japanese Anal Fisting or similar. Sometimes the story has a few phrases of my story and the rest is gibberish, or random phrases from other people's stories.

I don't look too hard. Some of those sites are stuffed with Malware.

 

[49greg]

I just googled my 49greg ID, and the first thing that came up was, of course Lit. But it listed my submissions in English, German, French and Portuguese. I checked one story in each and they're all in English, but each in the Lit area of those languages, and only the category listing is in the other languages. Everything else in English.

I imagine everyone is like that, but I sure didn't know we automatically got listed in the other language areas.

Learn something every day.

 

[Smokey125]

Hey, what do you know, my name is actually Greg too.

Also good points made, thank you guys as well. That does explain a good bit. Well, as I said at the beginning, that's just one story, out of 38 I've got on the site as of this post counting the non-numbered ones, and should anything happen with any of the others, well, so be it, I guess. Que sera, sera, I guess.

Thanks everyone for the responses!