Fan Ren, a famous translator, is renowned for her translation work of Les Enfants Du Capitaine Grant (hereinafter referred to as "Fan's translation") published in 1956. Fan passed away in 1971, and his daughter Fan Lang inherited and enjoyed the copyright of Fan's translation. Chen Xiaoqing is the translator of the 2015 edition of Les Enfants Du Capitaine Grant (hereinafter referred to as "Chen’s translation"), and the Central Compilation and Translation Press is its publisher. In 2020, Fan Lang filed the lawsuit against Chen and the Central Compilation and Translation Press. The plaintiff claimed that Chen's translation plagiarized Fan's translation, hence infringed Fan’s rights of signature, modification, protection over the integrity of the work, as well as the rights of reproduction and distribution, and should bear the responsibility of stopping the infringement, eliminating the influence and compensating for the losses.

The focus of controversy is how to identify the substantive similarity of the translated works. Translation, as a term, refers to the creative activity of converting one language into another. The originality of translated works is reflected in the conversion of language symbols. Since the translated works are the interpretation of the original works, the court of second instance did not stick to the traditional comparison on plot, language and other aspects, but analyzed them from the perspective of "contact possibility" and "detail comparison".

The possibility of contact is mainly determined by the publication of the prior work. Fan's translation is published earlier than Chen's translation, and enjoyed high popularity in the public, so the court may have the reason to suspect a certain contact between the two works. Still the court put more focus on "detail comparison". In this case, the court paid attention to the following details: (1) names and places that do not abide by the agreed translation norm; (2) free translation that can be interpreted via multiple ways; (3) processing of annotations, including adding and deleting annotations, and writing the original annotations directly into the text of the translation; (4) translation errors without reasonable explanation. To be specific, both versions translate "Vous connaissez cette lanque" into "do you understand German", while the literal translation of the original text is "do you understand this language"; for another example, both versions translate "qulques minutes plastard" into "a few hours later", and the correct meaning is "a few minutes later"; in yet another example, both versions mentioned "the British prosecutor is investigating the details of a major case", which means that the content of the original notes is put into the text, and the word "Britain" is added for further explanation. Based on the above factors, the court finally held that the similarities in details between the two versions could be hardly deemed as coincidental, hence the substantial similarity is established. 

In view of the fact that the copyright of Fan's translation had expired at the time of the second instance judgment, the court of second instance finally upheld the judgment of the two defendants to publish an apology and compensate for the losses, but revoked the judgment of stopping the reproduction and distribution of the books accused of infringement in the first instance judgment.