I just learned from Kate that the Irish media is all over the McKibbin’s story.
Now, I don’t want to accuse the Independent and its writer Jerome Reilly of plagiarism, but:
From Reilly’s story at independent.ie on Sunday:
“C’est ridicule, plus que ca, c’est stupide,” said Stephane Lajoie-Plante, who said he was a Quebec nationalist with some Irish ancestry.
“These signs aren’t outside where everyone can see them. They aren’t promoting English. If the Office wants to pick a fight with someone, you don’t pick a fight with the Irish over something as silly as this.”
Michael Kenneally, head of Concordia College Irish studies programme, said the signs were “cultural artifacts that spoke to Irish history”.
“They are in no way a commercial proposition, because they are not specifically selling any of these products,” he added.
From Alan Hustak’s Gazette’s story on Friday:
“C’est ridicule, plus que ça, c’est stupide,” said Stéphane Lajoie-Plante, who said he was a Quebec nationalist with some Irish ancestry.
“These signs aren’t outside where everyone can see them. They aren’t promoting English. If the Office wants to pick a fight with someone, you don’t pick a fight with the Irish over something as silly as this.”
Michael Kenneally, head of Concordia’s Irish studies program, said the signs are “cultural artifacts that speak to Irish history.”
“They are in no way a commercial proposition, because they are not specifically selling any of these products,” he added.
Reilly doesn’t mention The Gazette once in his story as a source.
Wow. The only material change (that I noticed) was factually inaccurate (Concordia College? Maybe in Minnesota or New York. Or Alabama, South Australia, or the unaccredited diploma mill from the Carribean island nation of Dominica? Really, between these colleges and the network of Lutheran universities, Concordia really needs a more distinctive name.)
(To continue on my tangent, I propose the Free University of Montreal/L’université libre de Montréal. It would be great, if only to see what people think the university should be free of: Palistinian sympathizers/Isreali sympathizers; commerialized use of common space/hippies; overbearing corporate presence on the Board of Governers/hippies; students who concentrate on studies, graduate and leave/CSU politicians (hippies or otherwise); etc. But I digress…)
I noticed that, but assumed the Gazette piece ended up on a wire someplace, and don’t most papers allow journalists to pull pieces off the wire, add a few flourishes and sign them?
The Gazette isn’t a member of Canadian Press, which would be the most likely way this could happen. A quick search doesn’t find these quotes in any wire story about the issue, (and I’d think a wire service would correctly translate “Concordia” into “Concordia University”).
It’s fairly common to include wire copy into articles, but that always requires attribution (“Reuters contributed to this report”, for example).
I’ve alerted the site to the problem, so we’ll see what happens.
I hadn’t seen the original Hustak article but I thought it was a bit odd that an Irish paper would quote somebody in French.
Out of curiosity, is “translating” the term used in publishing to describe the adaption of localized content to a larger or global context? In IT we talk of “localization” (or L10n, cuz we’re dorks) for bringing content to a local scale and “internationalization” (i18n, v.s.) for the abstraction of content to a global level or adaptability to switch to various localized contexts.
I haven’t seen “translating” used in that context. “nationalization”, “internationalization” and “localization” sound more accurate, though the latter would be used in newsrooms in phrases like “finding a local angle”.