International translation of docs - is it a scam?

[Phil Thompson]

On 7 Jun 2011 16:27:32 GMT, Peter Pearson <ppearson at nowhere.invalid>
wrote:
> On Tue, 07 Jun 2011 16:55:28 +0200, Alain Ketterlin wrote:
>> Chris Gonnerman <chris at gonnerman.org> writes:
>>
>>> On the 30th of May, I received an email from a man (I'll leave out his
>>> name, but it was properly male) offering to translate the docs for the
>>> gdmodule (which I maintain) into Belorussian. [...]
>>
>> The same has happened on the gcc list, where it has been considered a
>> scam. See, e.g.,
>>
>> http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2011-05/msg00046.html
>>
>> and messages referenced therein.
> 
> Interesting.  That link leads to a discussion of presumed link
> farmers using Google Translate to translate other people's pages,
> in exchange for links.
> 
> So I asked Google Translate to translate Chris Gonnerman's
> page, http://newcenturycomputers.net/projects/gdmodule.html
> , and the results were identical (on cursory examination) to
> the page produced by Gonnerman's correspondent, as reported
> in the original post.  (I won't post that URL here lest I
> support the farm.)

I was also asked for permission to translate a page from the PyQt site. I
agreed to this and was given a link containing the translation. I declined
to link to the page from my site (I will only link to sites with a proven
track record.) I note that the page has now been removed.

Phil