HACKER Q&A
📣 nobody9999

Is this a double translation to avoid copyright violations?


I was about to read an article about the just completed baseball game between the Yankees and Red Sox, when a snippet from a Google search caught my eye:

   8 minutes ago · This time Xander Bogaerts and 
   Kyle Schwarber hit dwelling runs off Gerrit 
   Cole, because the Red Sox beat the Yankees, 
   6-2, within the American ...
The article itself[0] is rife with incorrect usage and really odd use of language.

So I wondered, is this an auto-generated article?

Upon further reflection, it reads more like something translated from English to a foreign language and then (poorly) auto-translated back to English.

The website in question appears to be based in India, but is entirely in English (sort of).

Here's the first paragraph of the article:

   BBucky Dent was within the stadium, the 
   calendar stated October, and every staff 
   wanted to win to maintain its season alive. It 
   had been 43 years since Dent’s well-known 
   dwelling run helped the Yankees win the final 
   elimination recreation between these storied 
   rivals at Fenway Park, and almost a half-
   century later, Boston lastly received a small 
   measure of revenge for that exact recreation.
What might compel someone to do that? To disguise that the work is plagiarized? Some other reason? I find it quite mystifying.

[0] https://popnews247.com/2021/10/06/yankees-are-done-season-ends-in-a-wild-card-loss-to-the-red-sox/


  👤 nobody9999 Accepted Answer ✓
It appears that my suspicions may be correct. The article mentioned appears to be an inferior and redacted copy of this article[0] from the New York Times (archive.is version here[1]).

Ans so I continue to wonder what the motivation might be for doing so, as those who can read English with even minor proficiency and have even a passing familiarity with baseball would immediately see it as something really abnormal.

The other really odd thing is that it appeared as the the third result in a search for the title of the NYT article.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/05/sports/baseball/yankees-r...

[1] https://archive.is/iW2ur


👤 retrac
Reminds me how spam sometimes come with systematically mis-spelled terms to get around the spam scoring mechanisms like how many times "Viagra" shows up. Usually much smarter than just a list these days though. I suspect it's like that. Intended to get around automatic detection, while still showing up in search results.