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Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science

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Re: Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science

#211

Post by numpad0 »

FabHK wrote: post #62

Some of these tortured phrases are great. My favourites: "flag to clamor" for signal to noise "individual computerized collaborator" for PDA (personal digital assistant) "haze figuring" for cloud computing "information stockroom" for data warehouse "focal preparing unit" for CPU "discourse acknowledgement" for voice recognition "mean square blunder" for MSE (mean square error) "arbitrary right of passage" for random…

These sounded Chinese to me so threw this comment into Google Translate to figure what typical forward translations are and reverse translation of tortured versions will be. Bingo. Those are clearly translated from Chinese. Not sure if those are some form of plagiarisms as clamored or just a bad translation software prevalent in Chinese research communities though.

From top to bottom: 信噪比, 個人數字助理, 雲計算, 數據倉庫, 中央處理單元, 語音識別, MSE（均方誤差）, 隨機訪問, 隨機森林, 隨機值, 情感分析

Deep-fried versions: “旗幟到喧囂”, “個人計算機化合作者”, “霧霾計算”, “信息庫”, “焦點準備單元”, “話語確認”, “均方錯誤”, “任意通行權”, “任意林地”, “不規則尊重”, “惡名考試”

Re: Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science

#212

Post by kbenson »

dkarl wrote: post #182
atrettel wrote: post #60

I have encountered something similar to this for a submission that I reviewed for a scientific journal. I will not list any names or give much detail past those generalities, but I pointed out that the authors were misusing a particular technical term. In my review I defined the term and explained it briefly. I asked the authors to revise their submission accordingly. The paper was not bad but the authors did not kno…

As a native English speaker, but not an academic researcher, I would have naively done the same. To preface: I am speaking in ignorance of the mechanisms of credit and advancement in your field, so I'm undoubtedly overly harsh. I'm not even trying to be fair, because I admittedly don't have the knowledge to do so. I know academia is a different world from private sector industry, but I would think if the point of a c…

I almost replied that I had the same view after reading your comment but before opening the article in question. After reading the first but of the article, I think the GP is possibly saying something else, when taken in context, which is that this is exactly the behavior that would be expected from someone that's plagiarizing something else in general using the technique from the article, and all the criticism did was help them get a better plagiarized paper.

I can't speak for GP as to whether this was true, or if there are different norms for that sector, or the author was slightly aggressive in asserting their rights, or the assumptions we're making about the content of the criticism are off, but given the article brought a new dimension to it, I thought that worth mentioning.

Re: Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science

#213

Post by a9h74j »

atrettel wrote: post #141
turnersr wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your review, did you suggest the definition and explanation that they used? In this situation, would have an acknowledgment at the end have been enough? In my mind, it seems like you all had a conversation and the authors took up your suggestions as the reviewer.

No, I did not suggest the definition and explanation as content for them to use. I was trying to explain a concept that they discussed incorrectly multiple times in the paper. It is an advanced concept that might not even appear in graduate-level courses on the subject, so I can understand why they did not understand it fully. That said, I did not give them permission to copy my words there. If there are any particul…

Based upon your description around plagiarism, I doubt a customary end-credit "to an anonymous reviewer" could have been enough.

Re: Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science

#214

Post by buu700 »

I discovered something similar a couple days ago. After googling the title of a paywalled article (that I didn't care enough about to actually pay to read), the closest thing to the unredacted article in the search results was a version that that clearly been automatically rewritten in this exact manner. It was barely decipherable, so I gave up immediately.

Re: Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science

#215

Post by numpad0 »

Anon1096 wrote: post #172
craftinator wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's a common technique/first layer of plagiarizing a text to translate it from english to eg. spanish and then from spanish to english It's also a common technique for people who don't speak English to translate it... In fact, quite a bit more common.

I find it unlikely a machine translator would spit out phrases like "counterfeit conscience" and "haze figuring" over AI and cloud computing with 1 pass. Plagiarism via multiple pass throughs seems much more likely.

Maybe unlikely between two Indo-European languages with closely related sentence structures and vocabularies, but plausibly likely for others. DeepL just gave me "potter's screw" for "pan-head screw" in my language, for example.

Re: Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science

#216

Post by chaps »

atrettel wrote: post #198
wombatmobile wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What the authors should have done was ... In the absence of an explicit directive or request from you, given that the authors are from a different culture, how do you expect them to know what was required by them? I don't mean to be snarky or accusative. Your comment was thoughtful, articulate and detailed, which tells me you are a sophisticated communicator.

It's a fair question. They were foreigners submitting to an American journal, so there is always the possibility for some sort of cultural misunderstanding in addition to any language difficulties. Nonetheless, the journal's submission process provides authors with a page listing ethical standards they have to follow, and it says that plagiarism of any form is not allowed. In fact, this journal's particular set of st…

So, I understand how it's plagiarism, but I'm still not following why your suggestion, with the goal of helping them get their paper accepted, wouldn't be acceptable to copy/paste. It was to them and only to them, so it's not like it's a piece of substantial work from another team. Seems to be an extreme form of following the letter of the rule, and not the spirit of the rule. But, I'm not an academic so I don't really understand this sort of lack of discretionary allowance..

Re: Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science

#217

Post by [deleted] »

anchpop wrote: post #183
atrettel wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a good question that I do not have a good answer for, unfortunately. The review process for this journal is supposed to be blind, so crediting me would only reveal me as a reviewer. An anonymous acknowledgment is better than nothing, if the authors only copied a short definition without my permission, but they copied an entire paragraph from my review without my permission. That's just inexcusable. I can unde…

I don’t understand what the problem here is actually. If you plagiarize on an assignment for school, that’s bad, because the goal of assignments is to test your knowledge and plagiarism makes it a less effective test. But here the goal (I think) is to produce an informative and accurate paper. You told them the definition - what would have been gained by rephrasing the definition you told them? Especially if they’re…

[deleted]

Re: Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science

#218

Post by arthur2e5 »

numpad0 wrote: post #211
FabHK wrote: post #62

Some of these tortured phrases are great. My favourites: "flag to clamor" for signal to noise "individual computerized collaborator" for PDA (personal digital assistant) "haze figuring" for cloud computing "information stockroom" for data warehouse "focal preparing unit" for CPU "discourse acknowledgement" for voice recognition "mean square blunder" for MSE (mean square error) "arbitrary right of passage" for random…

These sounded Chinese to me so threw this comment into Google Translate to figure what typical forward translations are and reverse translation of tortured versions will be. Bingo. Those are clearly translated from Chinese. Not sure if those are some form of plagiarisms as clamored or just a bad translation software prevalent in Chinese research communities though. From top to bottom: 信噪比, 個人數字助理, 雲計算, 數據倉庫, 中央處理單元,…

This is not a machine translation issue. The deep fried versions in Chinese make about as little sense as it does in English. Again, this is caused by word-by-word theasurus-running most likely in English.

Re: Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science

#219

Post by peterkelly »

atrettel wrote: post #141
turnersr wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your review, did you suggest the definition and explanation that they used? In this situation, would have an acknowledgment at the end have been enough? In my mind, it seems like you all had a conversation and the authors took up your suggestions as the reviewer.

No, I did not suggest the definition and explanation as content for them to use. I was trying to explain a concept that they discussed incorrectly multiple times in the paper. It is an advanced concept that might not even appear in graduate-level courses on the subject, so I can understand why they did not understand it fully. That said, I did not give them permission to copy my words there. If there are any particul…

"If there are any particular changes I want the authors to do I put them in quotes. This wasn't in quotes." (atrettel, 2021)

This is a very subtle distinction and it sounds like being more explicit about it would have been a good idea.

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