The British Museum has offered to pay a writer for her work after she alleged her poetry translations had been plagiarised in a landmark exhibition.
Earlier this week, the museum removed a segment of its China’s Hidden Century exhibition after Yilin Wang said she did not receive any credit or reimbursement for her translations of the work of Qiu Jin, a Chinese revolutionary.
On Thursday, the museum said it had apologised for the “unintentional human error” and “offered financial payment for the period the translations appeared in the exhibition as well as for the continued use of quotations from their translations in the exhibition catalogue. The catalogue includes an acknowledgment of their work.”
The museum, which said it took copyright permissions seriously, had “made an inadvertent mistake and fell short of our usual standards”. It is understood the amount offered to Wang is what would usually be given by the museum for this type of work.
The China’s Hidden Century exhibition is the result of a four-year research project in collaboration with more than 100 scholars from 14 countries. The show consists of 300 objects, half from the British Museum and half borrowed from 30 different British and international lenders – with most being publicly displayed for the first time.
After the plagiarism allegations, the British Museum also said its staff – who spent years working on the project – had been subjected to personal attacks on social media.
“This is unacceptable,” it said. “It is through their scholarship and efforts, and those of their collaborators, that we have been able to present this period of Chinese history, through people-centred stories, to the thousands visiting the China’s Hidden Century temporary exhibition at the British Museum.
“We stand behind our colleagues fully and request those responsible for these personal attacks to desist as we work with Yilin Wang to resolve the issues they have raised concerning the use of their translations within the exhibition.”
It is understood members of the curatorial team have also been subject to vilification in direct emails, while academics who have previously worked with the museum have written to express their concern and confusion about the incident.
Julia Lovell, professor of modern Chinese history and literature at Birkbeck University and one of the principal researchers of the exhibition, told the Guardian she was “in full sympathy with Ms Wang’s anger” and had been in contact with the translator to apologise for the error.
She said while she was not involved in any design or permission aspects of the project, including with regards to the Qiu Jin installation and the use of quotations in the exhibition, and she recognised that what had happened was “very wrong”.
“It was a genuinely accidental, unmalicious human error amid a very complex project, for which the British Museum have apologised profusely and sincerely, and sought to make amends,” she said.
Yesterday, Wang posted on Twitter that the British Museum had told her it would not be reinstating her translations in the exhibition.
