Translation plagiarism
So, we seem to have run into a bit of trouble lately…regarding translation theft & denial of any such action when confronted about it. After much hesitation, we’ve decided to make this issue public in hopes of raising awareness.
It seems that the now-deactivated blog @geekyobsession (geekyobsession.com) has plagiarised nearly every Diabolik Lovers translation they’ve posted there. Two translators have been working on the series at Geeky - one of whom seems to be completely honest with her scripts, while the other does not.
We’ve messaged this potentially dishonest translator several times, whose excuses could easily be truthful, but due to lack of evidence from her end and several contradictory claims we’ve found of hers in the past, we have reason to believe otherwise.
Here is our proof that translations been stolen, including the timestamps.
She first claimed to have translated HDB herself, as evidenced here:
And even made these claims on her Patreon as well.
Then she explained that someone she knew had been sending her scripts, which she would subsequently edit and upload to her site.
Later, she said that this friend went back and retroactively changed all of her translations to stolen ones. Yes, this is entirely possible, but we found it very unlikely. As of yet, she has failed to give us sufficient proof to support her claim, and has instead chosen to defend the person who supposedly wronged her even though screenshots of her wordpress history logs showing edits by a third party would probably be sufficient.
To make matters worse, we found evidence that Diabolik Lovers MORE,BLOOD, Hoshizora no Comic Garden, and Kamigami no Asobi scripts have been stolen as well. Plus Vampire Knight information from a Gamefaqs guide.
We’ve compiled a detailed list, pm us if you’d like to see and compare.
We will tag the other translators as well:
@nagittos @dialovertoenglish @maichiruhanabira @diabolikloverstranslation @akuichansera @sweetremiks @silvermoon249
She has also taken from @sakamakihouse and himeutsugi, which can only be found via the Wayback Machine - but we have included links to their cached work in the list linked above.
She has privated her wordpress blog, her blogspot blog, and removed her tumblr account. While that may make it seem like the problem is over, she has not addressed any of this publically. Without any of this coming out, if she ever makes a new blog or something of the sort, the stealing could very well happen again. We also felt a moral obligation to alert those that we knew were stolen from.
Hello, this is Kairi.
This is not how I wanted to come back to this blog and update it, but as you can see above, this is quite important. Even more so because unfortunately, our team became victims of this mess.
Recently we were alerted through @otogetranslations’s post and reddit that the “translator” Karen from the blog Geeky Obsession had been plagiarizing translations from various otome games and projects, including ours. She had taken our team’s Passion Pink translations and used it as her own. Theresa was able to confirm that her translation in our Dropbox folders had been stolen. Additionally, upon further research of Geeky Obsession’s cache, we found that she had been using the initial translations of our team and not what we had edited and completed (seen below).
What was concerning for us was how she was able to get her hands on these files, because we have never released any of these files publicly, nor planned to. Previously, I answered an ask requesting for the texts and I explained that we would not be releasing text files without permission from our past team. Upon investigating our Dropbox, we realized that someone that had worked on the team had given access to a number of people to the files, and Karen may have been one of the people given access. While it is our mistake for trusting this person, they have violated our trust and allowed people to take private files that were not theirs and use them (and in Karen’s case, claim them and profit off of them). These files are the hard work of our team and to plagiarize them is infuriating. It is disrespectful to our past members who have worked hard (and for free, mind you) for this team. This project was started because we wanted to share this game that we loved with everyone, and we never wanted to profit off of it. We never will, for that matter.
We urge everyone to be wary of this “translator” and to not support them in the case that they do come back. They have dodged admitting to their wrong-doings and have gone under the radar without so much as an apology. It worries us that they may attempt this again to other translators and teams, so we are spreading the word.
As for the status of this project, we quietly stopped work awhile back due to various events happening amongst otome fanprojects at the time that could’ve threatened this project and personal issues. However, we never shut it down completely. We toyed with reviving the project at the right time because we all wanted to release this game (and still do!). Of course, this is not how we wanted to come back. But with events transpiring how they did, we are planning to return to this project.
When we have a more definite plan, we will update again. But for now, we ask for your support in spreading the word about this person and your eventual support when we come back!
