Am I Really Plagiarizing?
I have been accused by @hivewatchers of plagiarism in this comment
Direct translation without giving credit to the original author is Plagiarism.
All my posts of the last seven days have been downvoted to 0.00.
Starting in February, I have published translations to English of stories from two French books published before 1905. They have been in the public domain for several decades.
The first book was Le Livre des Mille Nuits et une Nuit (One Thousand and One Nights) was published in Paris between 1898 and 1904.
The second book was Contes populaires de la Gascogne (Folk Tales from Gascony) was published in 1886.
Plagiarism, in Wikipedia, is defined as
the fraudulent representation of another person's language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions as one's own original work.
Nobody in their right mind would ever think that I pretend that the Tales of the 1,001 Nights, or Folk Tales from Gascony, are my "own original work".
I am not stealing the work of anybody. The original French books are from Wikisource, The Free Library. Any book in Wikisource is in the public domain and the authors are all deceased.
Granted, I did not provide the sources for these translations. So, by @hivewatchers definition, my posts are Plagiarism.
So, what would have happened if I had provided the sources? In their comment, @hivewatchers said also:
Please note that direct translations including attribution or source with no original content are considered spam.
So, if I had provided the sources, my posts would have been considered spam by @hivewatchers and they would have been downvoted for this reason.
What kind of original content could I provide when posting these tales?
Am I Spamming?
In Wikipedia, the definition of Spamming is
to send multiple unsolicited messages (spam) to large numbers of recipients for the purpose of commercial advertising, for the purpose of non-commercial proselytizing, for any prohibited purpose [], or simply repeatedly sending the same message to the same user.
I don't see how my posts could be considered Spamming, except that @hivewatchers have decided that translations without extensive original content are "prohibited purpose".
I wish that @hivewatchers reconsider their rule for translations of texts that have been in the public domain for many years. But they probably will not do it.
If @anyx is involved with @hivewatchers, I would like to have his opinion on this subject.
Note that I will upvote any meaningful comment, positive or negative.
-- Vincent Celier