Pirates of the internet: Lingo24 website ’stolen’
They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery…so when a translation company from China stole Lingo24’s website hook, line and sinker, perhaps we should’ve patted ourselves on the back for a job well done. After all, there are countless translation companies on the internet, so to choose our site to copy must mean that we’re doing something right.
And of course, we are doing something right. When the good people at Universecy scanned cyberspace for a website to pilfer, they will have noticed that Lingo24 ranks highly on Google for all the key translation industry search terms, such as ‘translation agency’ and ‘translation ’services’. So it kind of makes sense to steal ours.
Whilst we certainly view the wholesale theft of our website as bad, we did try to see the funny side of things. Not only did they keep the vast majority of their website text as it appears on ours, but they also discussed their ‘Aberdonian roots’ and even took one of our precious Project Managers.
The whole episode was picked up by the BBC, with Radio Scotland and ‘Five Live’ interviewing Lingo24’s founder and Managing Director Christian Arno, and a feature appearing on the BBC website: Chinese web pirates steal design.
The story was even covered by a couple of Dutch newspapers and one in Austria. All this coverage ultimately meant that Universecy had to take their site down. But as you can see from the screen-shot below, the sites were certainly identical.
