One of the reasons that I agreed to add a Spanish language section to the Fit to Talk project, was to enable me to read some of the posts from the Spanish language board here. I gather that there are some really good threads and posts there, but I don't speak Spanish, so they are lost to me.
Obviously there is no problem if the original poster is bilingual, but what happens if a member translates and posts another member's posting. There is an obvious issue of plagiarism. What is the best way to avoid this accusation? My feeling is that the translator should state that it is a translation, and give credit to the creator of the post. He should also provide a link to the natural language post. Would this be an acceptable practice, or can somebody suggest a better option. Also, I believe that the translator should obtain the permission of the OP before using his work.
I appreciate that this suggestion could lead to a flood of low value translation posts, and I hope that anyone considering posting translations will be responsible, and only use exceptional posts for translation. Obviously if this concept is abused, it will be banned, and I think that will be a loss to all of us.
Based on my experience, if article wasn't stated as CC0 or public domain it has copyright nature so anyone must ask permission
before modify, copy, or translate. The problem is that sometimes "smart" translator will be able to rephrase the original article so that it become a brand new local article or may I say require peer review to really examine that article.
To overcome this issue some forum stated CC0 for all its contents, so anyone can use it freely.
Others stated CC-BY to indicate he/she must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. So, it depends on forum's license.
Anyway, this is a difficult issue and requires willingness of both party to cooperate, especially the translator one. The most viable one is to do peer review, in this case moderator can punish plagiarists.
Another consideration that I thought of after I had started this thread, is who should get the merit if the original post is really good. I believe that the originl ntive language poster should get the reward, but should the trnsltor get something for finding the post and translating it?
Usually both got reward (in publishing case) in term of royalty split. In some case, the translated one give better result, many books got famous overseas (meanwhile not so lucky in its home country).
Maybe it can be somewhat tuned into merit system.
