Using a machine translation tool to countercross-language plagiarism

Cross-language plagiarism is a type of plagiarism where texts from one languageare translated to another, concealing the origin of the text. This study tested if Google’s machine translation tool could be used as a preprocessor to a plagiarism detection tool in order to increase detection of cross-language plagiarism. It achieved positive results for detecting plagiarism in machine translated texts, while craftier plagiarised translations with higher degrees of obfuscation were harder to detect. Utilising even simple tools such as Google’s machine translation tool thus seems to indicate that steps to solving the problem of cross-language plagiarism can be taken