Slow Tuesday, plus an observation

Not much has been happening since I last posted. I haven't been assigned anything to edit all day. Apparently most of the translators are out of the office, so there's not any work for the interns. My story from yesterday is now online, which is exciting. I am a little bit concerned, though. We've noticed that certain things that are acceptable here in China would not be acceptable in the U.S., particularly concerning copyrights.

You might already be aware of this, since it's not unknown that people in China pirate movies and music, as well as clothing and purse designs. What I didn't realize before working here was how acceptable it is in China to take someone else's words and claim them as your own. Usually the reporters translate stories that we receive from Xinhua, a news wire service, and then claim the byline for themselves, whereas in the U.S. we would give the original reporter the credit, with a note that says, "Translated by..."

This lack of copyright also extends to online sources. Some of the stories or sections of stories that Dan, Brian and I have been given have been copy-and-pasted directly from Wikipedia or some other website. Not only is the plagiarism bad, but Wikipedia not a credible source to get information from to begin with.

So today when my story went online, I clicked over to it and saw that screenshots from the two films I viewed had been added to the story I wrote. There is a note that the photo is from each of the films, but there is no credit to whomever owns the rights to the films, and I doubt they asked for permission. I'm torn over what to do about this. On the one hand, I could ask them to remove the shots. It has my name at the top, and I don't want to take the credit for copyright infringement. On the other, I'm not sure it would do any good. We've told them before that copy-and-pasting paragraphs and other material is not professional, and they don't seem to understand. I'll probably end up leaving it as-is, but I would like some feedback from people who know better than I do.

On to my observation....

I remembered that yesterday during the video lecture, Dr. Tuggle asked a question that received an interesting answer. The question was something like, "What should you do to prepare your questions for a video interview." I think Dr. Tuggle was looking for answers like, "Ask open-ended questions," or "Make sure the answers to the questions would add something we don't already know about the story."

The very first answer, with almost no hesitation, was, "Make sure your questions won't irritate the person." This made me chuckle at first, but I started to think about it more later. At first I thought was that this was a reaction to the fact that press conference questions must be submitted to be approved beforehand, because some topics are censored.

Then, it reminded me of what my friend Karen told me about Chinese culture; that they aren't giving me much work because they don't want to push me too hard. It seems that it's the Chinese way to try not to make anyone uncomfortable.

Which, I just now mused, is exactly the opposite of what I feel has happened with the swimming competition. (Courtney chuckles sarcastically)

Swimming competition first thing tomorrow morning. Maybe they'll give me a prize for being the worst. Ever.