the way some people teach French

Just heard from a new friend that she is teaching a French reading course, and among the recent assignments have been… translations from Meillassoux blurbs and from Collapse.

It might be fun to play that “telephone” game, translating Collapse articles into French and then have someone else do it back into English just to see what the result would be.

On a loosely related note, did I ever tell the story of how my colleague caught a crafty plagiarist? The student submitted an essay on Kant at a level clearly beyond his own. But nothing showed up on either Google or turnitin.com, so the proof was lacking.

After awhile, however, my colleague realized what had happened… The student had found a German article on Kant, then cleverly fed it through a translation program, thus creating the English version of the article for the first time and making it immune to plagiarism detection programs.

Unfortunately, the student didn’t know enough about Kant to realize that the translation program’s suggestion of Criticism of Pure Reason is not the standard English rendering of Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Otherwise, he might never have been caught.