Setting the record straight

[gbausc]

You must admit, things are starting to get exciting here again, are they not?

Has everyone noticed that Christine seems to know more and has far more guts
to take the on the charges against Andrew, than Andrew has?

Come on, Andrew; step outside.

I seem to give you all great pleasure by my posts, so here goes another one.

Christine, you are a liar! There is no better way to say it.

I posted 27 verses from Andrew's book, and you say I and Ryan posted hundreds. Ryan posted 20 verses in his review. I wrote one review at Amazon and Ryan posted one. That's it. Two separate reviews, so don???t lump the numbers together.

But you refuse to do the math and you are defending Andrew for wholesale copying and pasting the entire NT and changing about 5% of it, while accusing me of violating his copyright for reproducing 27 verses. The "straining out a gnat and swallowing the camel" charge against you still stands. You say you cannot reproduce Andrew's note which shows he did not plagiarize, but that would violate his copyright. What can you be thinking here? Is the note more than 70 verses? You "strain out a gnat and swallow the camel".


The Essay Rater analysis I displayed does not show any verses reproduced from AENT, nor did I ???quote??? them, though it analyzed 60 chapters of text I entered into the program to test them. I simply displayed the test results, showing two statistics for each chapter: Overall score and pagiarism score of unoriginal content. Andrew's translation flunks all 60 tests with flying colors; 0% overall for every single one of the 60 chapters and an average plagiarism score of 77% unoriginal content. Every chapter is flagged in almost every line for aramaicpeshitta.com, where Paul Younan's (Lawrence Sheet's prepared "English only files") and James Murdock's translation are linked as suggested sources consistently to Andrew's text in the corresponding verses.

The fact that these two translations are consistently cited as sources for Andrew's is key to understanding the plagiarism connection. If there were no copying of another translation involved, the plagiarism score would have been much lower (usually below 40%) and, more importantly, the suggested sources would be linked to short and scattered phrases to other translations at many different web sites on the internet.

BTW, Essay Rater gives a conservative estimate in its plagiarism scores; an actual hand manual of identical words shows Andrew reproduced 90-98% of Younan and Murdock, depending on the passage under consideration.

Using Essay Rater as a test for plagiarism, as far as I know, does not constitute any copyright violation, as I did not make the AENT text public or distribute it in any way; it was visible only to myself.

Where is your source about "public domain cannot be plagiarized?" You are making an assumption here, and it is an assumption fatal to your argument. You are assuming anyone can use public domain material and incorporate it wholesale into a document or even republish it without attribution. That is simply false; it is wrong and it should be wrong to do so.

Turnitin.com has FAQ's concerning plagiarism and a fact sheet concerning it:

11. What is the "public domain?"
Works that are no longer protected by copyright, or never have been, are considered "public domain." This means that you may freely borrow material from these works without fear of plagiarism, provided you make proper attributions.

It's the "proper attributions" part that Andrew failed to comply with. He has misled the customer to believe, as Dawid has testified, and others, including myself, in his advertisements
and in his introduction, that his is a new translation, indeed, "the most definitive Aramaic to English translation in nearly 2000 years".

The claim that public domain cannot be plagiarized is simply false, and only a thief and a fraud would take someone else's translation(s) and put his name on it and sell it as his own translation. What you are saying is that I could republish Lamsa' s 1933 translation with my name on it and sell it with impunity. This is essentially what Andrew has done. The issue is not public domain, nor is it getting permission from Paul Younan (who says never translated anything from the NT anyway); it is about "proper attribution"- giving proper credit to the real authors, for the translation (not the notes, which is another topic, as far as I am concerned.)

Andrew has not given proper attribution in his preface or anywhere else in the book ,that I can find. Page v says "Paul Younan's translation has been compared from Matthew 1 to Acts 15; James Murdock for the remainder..."
How is that proper attribution? He attributes nothing here. He says he compared them to (?)

To what did he compare? Who knows? To his translation? To the Aramaic? Younan and Murdock to each other? If to his own translation, then he translated his own work and compared theirs to his, and presumably modified his here and there as a result. That would be the normal sense of the above quote.

That would indicate that Andrew did his own translation work, and that the vast majority of it is original; but this is not actually the case, as I have shown, and as Andrew is now forced to admit, (almost). He still has not told us how much of the work is original to him, and told Albion, "I don't like your tone" for even asking the question. Now Albion is banned for it.
What is this, the Grand Inquistion of Rome? If someone dares to question the great Andrew Gabriel Roth, he is excommunicated? I see nothing but corruption and lies being perpetrated here to protect Andrew Roth from his own sins.

He refused to answer the question.

No one reading Andrew's web site or his AENT introduction would conclude anything other that what Dawid or I, or Albion, or Ryan concluded: Andrew Roth's AENT was his own original translation work.

Come on, Andrew. Tell us all here. How much of the translation is actually yours?

All the other material you and Christine have injected into this debate is just so much smoke. You are quoting from posts written 5 years ago that have nothing to do with the subject we are discussing.

"Brevity is the soul of wit", saith Shakespeare; Let's try to keep it brief and to the point, lest we prove to be witless.


Dave Bauscher