HACKER Q&A
📣 DamnInteresting

How to deal with plagiarism via unauthorized translation?


I operate a US-based website where we publish original long-form non-fiction. I have dealt with plagiarism before, but this is a new situation for me.

The short version: There is a popular Mexico-based website that has been translating our articles into Spanish sentence-by-sentence, and posting them as their own works. They also take some of our images and artwork without credit. The offending site appears to have a large following (larger than my own site, anyway), with over 100k followers on Facebook.

Long version: I discovered two articles plagiarized in this way because the person posting it had added "Source: [our site name here]" at the bottom of the text, and it triggered a Google alert. Looking around their site I soon found additional articles that were directly translated from our material sentence by sentence, and none of these cited their source.

I emailed the listed contact address, asking them to take down the unauthorized translations (in a polite, professional tone, just in case this was the work of a rogue contributor or something). They did not reply, but they did swiftly edit those two articles to remove the "Source" line from the bottom.

So far I have have found 36 (!) articles on the offending site that are direct translations of our work, going back nine years. There may well be more I have not yet found, they are mixed with many other articles (which are probably plagiarized from other sources).

The site appears to be hosted on Google Cloud Platform. I reported the plagiarism to Google's Cloud Platform abuse department over a week ago, but predictably they have not responded apart from some automatic replies.

I've contacted a few IP attorneys, and that route is looking expensive, and unlikely reach a satisfactory resolution.

Is there anyone here who has dealt with something like this? Any advice?


  👤 charsi Accepted Answer ✓
Name and shame. You'll need to find some influencers on Twitter/Instagram/FB who have a following among the Mexican website's audience. Post an article detailing all the copyright infringements. Promote it on social media and hope the owners and the readership cares enough about content piracy.