You just aimed for the wrong market

Today's Chartered Institute of Linguists mailing list included a link to a blog post on an agency's site about how to succeed as a freelance translator. Shortly afterwards a link to the same blog post appeared on Twitter via a translator who often mentions relevant articles. It looked interesting, so I clicked on the link and went to read it.

Then it all went a bit pear-shaped.

If you're going to try to deceive linguists (and professional writers) you need to put a little work into it. I read the article and noticed that it slipped into talking about freelance writing instead of translation at the end. Odd. Barely an hour after tweeting the link, the same translator who had mentioned the article had read it carefully... and discovered it was almost identical to another article - on freelance writing.

A translator's bread and butter is pushing and prodding a text to find any inconsistencies and then finding out where they came from and what to do about them. When something suspicious comes up they have the research skills to unravel the threads and see where they lead.

The agency's blog post has now mysteriously disappeared.

Something similar happened on another translation mailing list earlier this year, where a moving plea for help was received from a member of the list who had been robbed while on holiday - except that the number of grammar and spelling errors in the email and - most damning of all - the use of US English made everyone realise at once that someone's email account had been hacked. Even if this person had been mugged and left stranded, they would never write something like that.

And the moral of the story? Other than good language skills being valuable for scammers and plagiarists, although this agency has taken the article off their site it has circulated amongst linguists on Twitter and will undoubtedly impact them. If someone has no respect for the work of others, they're not going to be your top choice as an agency to work with.

EDIT: The agency has apparently apologised and said it was down to a copywriter.