You will get caught

October 23, 2012 11:34 AM

Metafilter makes the national TV news in Finland (sort of)! A story in the Sunday edition of the nation's biggest daily paper Helsingin Sanomat about paranoia in the workplace was found to contain plagiarized quotes by a local blogger. The comment of mefite Schroder turns into a 37-year-old Finn named "Timo". The story contained two other quotes, also lifted and translated from English-language websites. The national broadcasting corporation YLE featured the case in the main news broadcast, and the newspaper has published an apology and a corrected online version of the story with all three plagiarized quotes removed.
posted by ikalliom to MetaFilter-Related at 11:34 AM (28 comments total)

huh, whoa cool!
posted by mathowie (staff) at 11:36 AM on October 23, 2012 [1 favorite]

Ooh, ah ahh! Ting tang!
posted by carsonb at 11:37 AM on October 23, 2012

Is it me or is every time we make the news because someone doesn't exist?
posted by griphus at 11:40 AM on October 23, 2012 [28 favorites]

Is it me or is every time we make the news because someone doesn't exist?

Worked for Keyser Soze.


Soze Blue?
posted by Atreides at 11:45 AM on October 23, 2012 [1 favorite]

I have a (now not so)(secret) hope that, one day, Joe Biden will say something I've written in a very public and highly inappropriate situation.
posted by Wordshore at 11:49 AM on October 23, 2012 [5 favorites]

Petri Mäenpää written story smelled from afar

Bwahaha! I love that translation.
posted by Omnomnom at 11:52 AM on October 23, 2012 [1 favorite]

ikalliom: "...about paranoia in the workplace..."

This is all an elaborate plot to punk the mods.
posted by zarq at 12:24 PM on October 23, 2012

Punk the Mods was my favorite Clash album.
posted by Chrysostom at 12:31 PM on October 23, 2012 [2 favorites]

Banhammer is the same in English and Finnish. Coincidence? I leave you to decide.
posted by arcticseal at 12:32 PM on October 23, 2012

Ha, crazy.
posted by cortex (staff) at 12:42 PM on October 23, 2012 [1 favorite]

I have a (now not so)(secret) hope that, one day, Joe Biden will say something I've written in a very public and highly inappropriate situation.
posted by Wordshore

Just change your username to Neil Kinnock and you can claim that he already has! (As I'm sure you already know.)
posted by jamjam at 12:44 PM on October 23, 2012

Where?
posted by MangyCarface at 12:50 PM on October 23, 2012

How can you tell a Finnish extrovert?

He steals from YOUR blog!
posted by The 10th Regiment of Foot at 1:03 PM on October 23, 2012 [3 favorites]

MetaFilter: Ha, crazy.
posted by GenjiandProust at 2:21 PM on October 23, 2012

Victory for blog sleuthing! Dumb question: has anything bad actually happened to the plagiarizer, beyond being exposed? I can't figure it out so far.

Because, wow, Google Translate is... kind of awful with Finnish. I've clearly been sort-of spoiled by their abilities with Russian (which are more like almost kind of OK, especially if you know a bit of the language and can figure out what they probably meant if you look at the original text.) They rarely leave stuff completely untranslated in Russian, at least.

For the record, "Kudrin: Save Greece in the euro area can not be" was originally readable; Bing gets it all the way to Kudrin: Save Greece in the eurozone cannot. Nearly all the headlines have the same problems. I'm not sure what it means that I would have been able to sort out what it should have been after about six weeks of Russian 101. I picked VoR because it ought to have been easier to translate. I am sure we're decades away from universal translators, sigh.

Also, the machine translators are crap at context. For instance, they don't ever seem to do the handy conversion of "FSB" from "Федеральная служба безопасности Российской Федерации;" you have to KNOW that it's "FSB" - the successor to the KGB - based on the translation of "Federal security service of the Russian Federation," which is precisely what someone who knows nothing about Russian is least likely to know, and something which a computer should be able to learn and retrieve. Sigh, again.
posted by SMPA at 4:45 PM on October 23, 2012 [1 favorite]

Google Translate is... kind of awful with Finnish.

Finnish is off in its own little language group with Hungarian (which I suspect Google translate is also terrible with) and I bet that makes machine translation super challenging. Now I will go geek out and read more about this.....
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 5:38 PM on October 23, 2012 [3 favorites]

Finnish is ... different. Quite difficult, but quite wonderful, as are the people (my second favorite country after the USA). Ordering drinks in bars north of the arctic circle, in Finnish, was very difficult.

Tolkien was deliriously happy when he discovered both Finnish, and the Kalevala (which he extensively borrowed from).

Finnish as a sung language.
posted by Wordshore at 6:47 PM on October 23, 2012 [1 favorite]

Jessamyn: You forgot Estonian.

shame!

posted by leotrotsky at 7:56 PM on October 23, 2012

I blew off the Sami also, but not because I don't care!
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 8:11 PM on October 23, 2012 [1 favorite]

Huh. I was not previously familiar with the blog that caught this, but to me this looks like a pretty impressive catch by the writer. If you follow the links, you'll see (in Google-translated glory) that before the above-linked post where the original quote was noted to have been traced to Metafilter by one of her readers, she had made an earlier post where she only commented that something seemed vaguely unnatural about the language HS article.

The thing is, I can see that weirdness now that she's pointed it out, but to me it still looks wrong only very subtly, and it would never have occurred to myself to make a blog post based on something like what she noted. Well, it's a blog about writing, and she's a professional writer, and one who's clearly earned that status. Again, nicely caught.

An apology by Helsingin Sanomat, which still leaves open the question of what sorts of consequences Mäenpää is going to face.

If people are sufficiently curious, I for one am later open for writing human translations for some of the relevant posts and articles.
posted by Anything at 8:23 PM on October 23, 2012

Holy crap -- from the Goognslated apology link: New York Times regrets the incident.. Careful with those analogies!
posted by Anything at 8:27 PM on October 23, 2012

Typo: vaguely unnatural about the language in the HS article.
posted by Anything at 8:31 PM on October 23, 2012

The managing editor of HS has said in the comments that they are thinking of changing practices regarding anonymous interviews.
posted by Anything at 8:46 PM on October 23, 2012

she had made an earlier post where she only commented that something seemed vaguely unnatural about the language in the HS article.

On second thought this is not really an accurate way to put it -- she did go into specifics about how the phrasing resembles certain English language idioms rather than any Finnish ones.
posted by Anything at 8:52 PM on October 23, 2012

Adding to my disappointment to this story is the recent announcement that along with a move to a paywall, the Helsingin Sanomat will be shutting down their English news service, which was admittedly initially temporary for what had been the full term of Finland's first EU presidency.

As an outside Finn, I'm stuck with the YLE English service when I don't want to tax my brain translating text, though my mom reminded me today Finnish was in fact my first language, which accounts for my verbal outbursts when I'm not conscious of where I am. Or when I start talking to animals -- they all understand Finn.
posted by myopicman at 10:22 PM on October 23, 2012

Yeah, Finnish is kind of hard to translate automatically because it's fairly rich in word forms as far as languages go. There are other languages which are even richer, but you get something like over 100 different forms for a verb and about 30 for a noun(*), which in addition can add endings from a small collection of modal particles to make for quite a selection. Basic words + modal particles count as single words in writing because by the orthographical rules you have to write them together, but this is also motivated by how the spoken language works. English usually expressed these ideas with separate words, short phrases or even intonation.

So the little parts of a possible English phrase, such as "I want to dance a little bit after all" can often be fused into one word in Finnish. That might be "tanssahtaisinkin" in Finnish (though that is not really the most natural way a native speaker would say it; I just wanted some kind of an extreme example here). Looking at it, assuming you know a bit of Finnish, you can find and recognize the root in the tanss- in the beginning and at least have some idea what the word means, but a simple computer algorithm can not and will have to leave it untranslated if there aren't any examples of it in its exact form in its data set. In turn, even a naive translation system or one based on a small data set should easily recognize the word dance standing alone in English text, or its comparatively few derived forms (danced, dancing, etc.). It might not do the whole sentence very well, but you'd at least have a chance of the result making some sense in the target language.

I think this is why you tend to see untranslated words in even short Finnish texts that you run through the Google Translate. There are just too many forms for the translator to find useful examples in its data sets.

(*) Nouns in Finnish can be declined to 15 different cases and singular and plural numbers. For most words some cases look exactly the same, but in turn some have a bunch of variant forms for some cases, especially the plural genitive. In addition to nouns other words in the nominal class are actually declined the same, including adjectives.

As for conjugating Finnish verbs, you can use this handy tool:

http://www.verbix.com/languages/finnish.shtml
posted by tykky at 1:11 AM on October 24, 2012 [7 favorites]

METAFILCHER!
posted by MuffinMan at 5:11 AM on October 24, 2012

Myopicman, you need YLE Selkouutiset - also conveniently available in podcast form!
posted by Wylla at 8:20 AM on October 24, 2012